alt.human (41 page)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I
WAS IN
water. Thick, impenetrable water. I couldn’t breathe and my lungs were on fire. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see. I tried to move and it was as if my limbs were cast in clay.

I was dying. I was drowning, and I would die, and in that last glimmer of life I knew that this was brain overload, the caul overpowering my feeble mind... that I would end up in a coma, or dead, and all would be lost.

I burst to the surface, or the surface burst around me, and I was in Laverne again, lying on my back in the middle of a street, the crowded tenements of Cragside looming around me, far more closely than they ever had in reality.

And there, in the windows, were faces, faces masked with tattoos; only, I knew these people, I recognised them.

One of them smiled, and it was Alya, and then on a nearby roof there was the towering figure of Mazar, naked, powerful, and holding a great slab of masonry over his head.

He hurled it and I watched it grow, and then I realised it was heading straight for me.

Still befuddled by my near-drowning, I managed to drag myself away to the side. The masonry hit the ground and exploded, fragments peppering my body.

I peered all around, but I was alone, no sign of Skids.

I saw them at the windows, descending through the buildings. A door opened and a tattooed man emerged, his body all slabs of muscle, limbs gliding easily. A woman followed him, carrying a metal club.

I backed away, but had nowhere to go.

“!¡
earnest
¡! Listen to me!” I cried. “Listen to my story. A story you don’t know...”

They wavered, rippled like the wall that was a door, back in the central spiral tower of Harmony.

“A story you’re scared of. I can help you know it.
We
can help you know it.”

T
ANGLED WOOD, ALL
around me. A cage of twisted branches and roots polished white, twining together to contain me.

I heard a voice, a tiny voice singing songs from my childhood.

Perched on a stump nearby, outside my cage, there was a child. It could have been a boy or a girl, naked, its chubby features androgynous, its genitals obscured by crossed legs. Tucked up behind its back was a pair of feathery wings.

It was not a child, I reminded myself. It was the starsinger. Or rather, it was a manifestation of the ’singer, an embodiment cast in a form I could understand.

“!¡
tentative | respectful
¡! I have a story,” I told it, and its face lit up. “Something new.”

B
ACK IN THE
atrium, when Saneth had explained that the starsingers could not handle the unknown when it was concentrated into what she-he called the condensate...

Back then, I had recalled Marek’s impassioned speech from earlier on our journey, when we had been debating whether to continue the search for Harmony or not. He had argued that humankind had no history, because no one recorded our story. We lived second-hand lives borrowed from alien culture, rather than establishing a life that was truly human.
Harmony is a place for us to learn to be human
. And Saneth had said that Harmony was where we could find our own story.

Back in the atrium, Saneth had told us that the only way to free the captive starsinger was to destroy the human condensate, for that was what the watchers were using to keep the being trapped.

And so now, held captive in a cage of wood, by a starsinger who was itself a captive, I said, “!¡
musing
¡! My kind has a story. A huge and rich story. It’s not known to you, and so it’s being used to bind you here. What would happen if you were to sing our story for us?”

Hope was a channel to the condensate: that was what her mind had been built to do, and that was why the starsinger feared her. “!¡
explaining
¡! I know someone. Someone who came here with me. Her mind is a channel to the minds of my kind, embedded in the All. What if, rather than imprisoning her, you were to cast another reality altogether and use Hope’s mind to channel the condensate there? A new realm. A new Great All.”

The feather-winged child sat on its perch, watching me with its head tipped a little to one side.

And still, it sang.

Chapter Forty

H
OPE KNEW THAT
the risks were high, particularly for her. The caul was risky enough, but she knew she was made differently. It could kill her, or it could do nothing at all.

The thing wrapped itself around her head and sank itself through her skin. Something was happening.

She felt each tendril as a pin prick, felt each fleshy tube penetrate, probe, start to pump its juices under her scalp.

She felt all this very consciously, and that was when she thought it was not going to work, but then it started to, started to seep across her perception of the dimly-lit basement area around her, blurring out the ill-lit faces of me and Skids.

W
HEN SHE CAME
to, she barely came to at all.

She was conscious, because she could think, although it seemed that even her thoughts were slow, each shape, each word taking years to pull together.

She had no feeling in her body, no sense of hot or cold, no sense of movement, even the shifting of her chest as she breathed. There were no sounds, not even the beating of her heart. No sight, no light, nothing to see.

Nothing at all, except the thoughts, the very slow thoughts, in her head.

N
OT EVEN THE
voices, she realised.

No chorus.

Nothing.

T
HEN, A CHILD.

A small child of maybe seven or eight years, with curly ringlets and furled wings.

Not a child at all.

A starsinger.

A singer of stars, a singer of the Great All.

She lay on her back, naked. Short grass, pressed feather-like against her skin, the ground hard beneath. The air was sweet, the light almost too bright from a deep blue sky.

The child stood over her, peering at her, curious.

Then, with a jerk of the wings, it lifted, hung above her, and started to sing.

S
HE DID NOT
know how long the child sang for.

It filled her head. That was all.

At some point, as she lay and let the song fill her, she saw a fleck against the blue, and suddenly there were two children, hanging above her, swooping in graceful, playful circles, singing their song.

Soon there were many more, until the air was full of them, and their song was swollen, rich, full of such complexity and tone that it was barely a song at all.

She felt the song in her chest, and then she felt it in her head and it was as if a wall had been broken down and the voices rushed out to meet it, the voices that had been dammed up inside her head.

It felt as if she had been opened up and her insides were spilling out. Like a waterfall. A wild summer storm flood.

The voices roared and rushed and there was no holding them back, no more constraining them.

A
ND FINALLY, HER
head was empty.

The voices had gone.

She was just Hope, and that was a very new thing indeed.

Chapter Forty-One

W
E WOKE, THE
three of us, and found each other in the dark.

We tore the cauls from our heads, painfully, and hurled them to the ground.

Clutching at each other’s arms, we found the spiral ramp and climbed into the light.

It took a moment for our eyes to adjust, but when they did, we saw the carnage that had been wrought.

The trees had fallen, the bushes torn apart as if a whirlwind had ripped through the atrium. Much of the vegetation was dead, withered.

I looked up and saw that only a few storeys above us the spiral tower had shattered, letting the light flood in.

Time had passed. There was no wild blizzard blowing in, although there must have been at some point, killing off the tender vegetation of the atrium.

I looked at my companions, finally, and saw that they were drawn, emaciated. We were all wraiths now.

We sat for a time to regain our strength.

Hope looked serene, more at peace than I had ever seen her before.

“!¡
concern
¡! The voices?” I asked.

“Gone,” she said. “The starsingers took them from me. The ’singer here tried, but he wasn’t strong enough, so they all came, all summoned to him by his song. They took him away, but first they took the voices. Where did the voices go? What did the ’singers do with them?”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! They created another Great All,” I told her. “A completely new one. They sent them there. Just us, just humankind.”

“Just us?” said Hope. “Won’t they be lonely there, an All just for themselves?”

I thought of it. A completely new reality, just for humankind. Somewhere, sometime, perhaps there would be a Hope and a Dodge, or two people very like us, sitting and talking, sharing.

I shook my head. They wouldn’t feel alone, when they had each other.

L
ATER, WE FOUND
the bones. Humans and one alien.

It was just the three of us, then. But we would not be alone.

Somewhere there was a new Great All, where people like us could discover and explore, where they could find their own story.

And somewhere, back to the west, there was the camp where we had left Ash, Jemerie, Pi and the others, and a story we could start for ourselves.

When they asked, we would tell them that we had not found Harmony, but that somewhere out there a new Harmony was being created.

We could ask for no better story than that.

Coda

“If they existed, they would be here.”

They never
were
here.

That was a different All.

Here, it is only us.

The End

About the Author

Keith Brooke
is a British novelist with a string of highly acclaimed short fictions and one previous novel from Solaris, a hit with critics,
The Accord
. He lives in the English county of Essex near to the sea. The biggest writers in SF regularly laud his output, and with the release of
alt.human,
the public are set to welcome a major talent into the charts.

In the far future, Mars is dying a second time. The Final War of men and spirits is beginning. In a last bid for peace, disgraced champion Yoechakenon Val Mora and his spirit lover Kaibeli are set free from the Arena to find the long-missing Librarian of Mars, the only hope to save mankind.

In the near future, Dr Holland, a scientist running from a painful past, joins the Mars colonisation effort, cataloguing the remnants of Mars’ biosphere before it is swept away by the terraforming programme.

When an artefact is discovered deep in the caverns of the red planet, the company Holland works for interferes, leading to tragedy. The consequences ripple throughout time, affecting Holland’s present, the distant days of Yoechakanon, and the eras that bridge the aeons between.

‘The narrative is both easy to read and set at an energetic pace... Reality 36 is more immersive than virtual reality and more intelligent than Deep Thought.’

SFBook
on
Reality 36

‘A big think on the issues raised by the existence of Articial Intelligence in society.’

I Will Read Books
on
Reality 36

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