Vellum (17 page)

The Lady Cypher, having all of Phreedom's memories graved into her, remembers how Tom talked of the Illusion Fields, a sweeping expanse of eternity stretching out past reality, farther away than the horizon that you never reach no matter how far you walk, closer than the shadow under your feet.

She remembers stealing the yagé, getting so fucked-up one night—after her brother left, it was—that Finnan had to body-slam her to the ground, out of the way of the thunderbolt that she'd called down. There was a storm raging, in the sky and in her heart.

“What am I?” she'd asked him, grabbing his grubby T-shirt, shoving at him, pulling at him as he struggled to his feet against her, singing at the storm with a voice that made her eardrums bleed, in words she couldn't hold inside her head. And it was only when the storm had stopped that he turned to her, and just looked at her as if it was the stupidest fucking question that he'd ever heard.

It was a fluke, of course, the lightning, but after that he started to open up, a little at a time, to tell her about the Cant, reluctantly.

“I want to know everything,” she'd said.

“Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” Finnan had said.

“Yeah, but it's pig-ignorance that gets most of the other animals,” she'd said.

Phreedom tries to hold on to the memory but it's as liquid as the language that she heard that night.

The Lady Cypher can't tell from the fleeting fragmentary imagery surrounding her if there is really something underneath. The god of the moon is too elusive. She seems to glimpse a darting consciousness out of the corner of her eye, but it's as quickly gone as it appears. The only message that he'll give her is the echo that she hears.

“My daughter craved the Great Beyond,” the voice of Enlil says. “Inanna craved the Deep Within, and she who takes the
me
of the Kur cannot come back. From the Dark City there is no return.”

He will not help.

The Gods of Old

“Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “there were gods all over the place. I mean, if you want to know how many gods there were, you only have to look at Ireland; a tiny little island and it's still full to the brim with spirits. Jesus, but half the fookin saints used to be the heathen gods of old, and all those fairies, every one of them, what are they but gods who lost their glory and went skipping off into the gloaming with only their glamour left, when Christianity came and put them out of their homes? That was the choice, ye see, when the angels came. Sign up or ship out. So some of them join up, becoming yer Saint Bridget's or whatever, and some of them take to the hills. Jesus, but can ye imagine it? Going from king of all the Tuatha-de-Danaan—of Cuchullain of the red hair, of Lud the silver-handed, Bran the thrice-blessed, the Dagda, with golden cauldrons and chariots and war-hounds bigger than men—to this foolish little lord of the Sidhe, hiding in burrows under the earth, and finally to the fookin fairy-folk of Victorian fancies. Fookin leprechauns and pots of gold. Celtic Twilight, my arse.”

“Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “there weren't any gods at all. Just human beings that lived and died and dreamed up foolish little fireside tales to make them all feel a little warmer in the cold night. They looked out to the sunset and they thought to themselves, why that's so beautiful there
must
be something out there. They buried their dead in the ground and couldn't bear to think of them just rotting, so they told themselves there was a land under the earth where all the dead live on like us. Or maybe it was in the far north, or at the source of some great river, in the mountains, in the sky, wherever. But for all the adventurers and explorers that went wandering over the face of the earth, did any of them ever find anything but people, painted up and draped in skins and dancing like loonies to the moon, but people nonetheless? Did that stop them, though? No. Why, they says, if there's no Heaven then we'll fookin build one. If there's no gods out there, we'll raise ourselves up by our bootstraps, grab a star out of the sky and wear it as a fookin crown and we'll be gods our fookin selves. So they built themselves a language for a ladder and clambered up over their own words till they did it. Only they took so many stars out of the sky, ye see, they left it full of holes, too weak to hold itself up, and so eventually, one day, the sky came crashing down on them so hard and heavy that it drove them right down into the earth, so deep that the only thing left of them sticking out was those crowns on their heads. Sure, there's those who somehow manage to stick their necks up out of the shite and look up into the ruins of Babel, read a few words written on the rubble, but at the end of the day, that's what we were and this is what we are now, up to our necks in history, in humanity, and with no more choice about it than the poor dead bastards buried in the earth by all our ancestors.”

“Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “the gods got fed up with this not existing malarkey that they'd had to put up with for the last forever, because if you don't exist, well, there's no pressing need to get out of bed of a morning; it's not like ye've got any work to go to, eh, and obviously that kind of unemployment lends itself to low self-esteem, if not downright depression. So they all came together one day and decided amongst themselves that they wanted to have a go at this existing thing. They'd been watching humans at it for a good few millennia, from the inside of their heads, living in the human imagination as they did, and the humans seemed to be having all sorts of strange experiences—living, dying, fucking, grieving, hunting, drinking—hell, even suffering is at least an experience, and to a god that only gets the secondhand scraps of dreams and delusions, well, it's better than nothing. Of course, most people have such poor imaginations that the gods had no idea what they were in for. They thought it would be all epic battles and noble struggles, valiant causes, good against evil. Ye have to pity them, sure, because they weren't at all prepared for life as it is, poor sods. What the fuck is this, they says to themselves, when they finally find a way to push themselves out from the back of our heads and into the noggin as a whole, when they pick themselves up off the floor and dust off their stolen bodies and look around at the world. What the fuck is this? Where's the grand quests and eternal mysteries? Where's the foreshadowings and symmetries, the plots, the themes? Where's the meaning? O, in time some of them would come to love it, sure, this mad world of ours; but some of them, well, they just keep trying to make it fit their notion of what a world
should
be like. They're insane, of course, and sooner or later one of them will come along and try and rope you into some mad empire-building scheme of theirs. And, of course, if you're not with them you're against them, far as they're concerned. Take my advice and steer well clear of them.”

“You know,” she had said to him, “nothing you say actually fits together. Shit, Finnan, can't you even try to be consistent with your bullshit?”

Thomas had laughed, brattishly superior as only an elder sibling can be.

“Consistency,” he'd said. “Fuck consistency.”

“It's not about consistency,” Finnan had said. “Where the Cant is involved it's not a matter of consistency. You can't tell the full story, the complete story, and hope to be consistent. Best you can hope for is…coherent and comprehensive. And where the fucking unkin are involved you're probably better off not bothering with either. Trust me, if they think you've figured out what it's all about—as if there is any such thing as
what it's all about
—they'll be all over you like fucking crows on a battlefield. Because that's what they want. A nice, simple answer to it all.”

“And you don't think there is one?” she'd said.

He shook his head.

“Even the book doesn't have that, from what I hear.”

“What book?”

“The Book of All Hours.”

“What's the Book of All Hours?”

“Ah,” said Finnan, “now that's another story altogether.”

A SLEEVE OF BLOOD AND BLACK

She was born Ninanna Belili, in the last years of the twentieth century
BC
, daughter of a neolithic chieftain and his priestess wife whose cosmology was collapsing with the blossoming of new ideas, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. She grew up with farming and fishing, with ceramic pots and grainstores for all, and mathematics and writing, and men with sickles bringing corn in from the fields, the whole Sumerian revolution. She flirted with the shepherd boy, Dumuzi, asked him to sing of Enki in his
abzu,
deep under the earth, asked him with a dreamy passion that would make him stop and look at her and ask her where she was, what she was thinking.

“Who am I?” asks the girl who used to be called Phreedom. The tattoo covers most of her arm now in a sleeve of blood and black, as if she's thrust her arm deep into the flesh of something vast and sick to seize its heart, a warrior or a surgeon. She's lost all track of time somewhere in all the involuted intricacy of the ink that webs her flesh, the swirling cyphers of another person's memory and identity. Iris is talking to her, but Phreedom doesn't hear her words. Inanna hears. Inanna listens now with Phreedom's ears, and nods, replies, but the girl who once was Phreedom is now deaf and mute, trapped somewhere deep inside herself.

What's left of her is thinking that maybe this wasn't such a good idea.

She was born Inanna, queen of heaven, priestess of the earth, in the last years of the twentieth world, daughter of a moon god and the mother earth whose tales were lost in the birth of new mythologies, somewhere between never and now. She grew up with fate and destiny, with epic heroes and archetypal roles for all, and history and law, and gods painted in ochre dragging the bodies of their titan forebears out of chaos, the whole subconscious genesis. She drank with the old god of wisdom, Enki, listening as he rambled on about the world of certainty that he was crafting for them all, scheming an ordered place, a time, a space. And when he had slumped, sodden with drink, into unconsciousness, she took his
me,
the plans of his grand scheme, the Gravings of Destiny, and slipped away into the night.

“Audacity,” says Madame Iris. “If there's one word that describes Inanna, little sister, it's audacity. First goddess to step up and take on the patriarchs at their own game, Inanna was. I mean, motherhood, that's an easy archetype for a female unkin to take on. Maid, mother and crone, right? Virgin princess, priestess-queen, witch-seeress. That's the way it goes. Neat roles all nicely tied up into packages. Fates and furies, norns and muses, graces and graia. All very well, but those roles don't offer much in the way of…character. But Inanna…Inanna wasn't going to play that game. Inanna had her own plans. O, they can have their Covenant, they can write every man, woman and child into their book of life, and bind us all to their ideas of destiny, of fate. But once you've met your fate, the story that they've written for you is over. The dead are free.”

Iris runs her fingers over the glossy eight-by-ten of the unkin mark and looks across at Phreedom's arm…Inanna's arm…whatever. It's not her best work but it'll have to do; it would be better if she had the original to work with but—she closes the ring binder—the copy will have to do.

Errata

The Book of Life

T
he angel known as Metatron, the man once known as Enoch, the god once known as Enki, lays his hand on the hotel guest book that sits up on the counter, smiles at the clerk and whispers a word that drops the man like a stone, unconscious, to the ground. It's a few years since he last had to use the language, but he hasn't lost it, he's glad to see. That's as it should be, though. He is the voice of God, after all.

The foyer is empty and out past the glass walls and the doors with their racks of tourist brochures for Little Switzerland and the Blue Ridge Parkway, the parking lot has only a couple of trucks and RVs. Even the Taco Bell across the way is empty, the employees in their cheap, garish uniforms sitting outside on the steps, gazing off into the distance and chatting.

He flicks his black dreads back out of his face and flicks his long black leather coatflap back to pull out his little leatherbound palmtop from his jacket pocket, lays it up on the counter, on top of the guest book. He doesn't have to hunt for a signature to know that they were both here, the little hatchling and her runaway brother. He knows the girl and her brother have a meeting somewhere, somewhen, not too far from here and now. It's all in his book.

That's what worries him, actually; that's why he's here in person. Because according to the unkin who were sent to bring the boy in, Thomas Messenger died trying to escape from them. According to those same two unkin, Phreedom Messenger was left bleeding to death in a catatonic stupor, her soul more violated than her body.
She's out of the game,
they'd said.
Little birdy got her wings broke. End of story.

Except that's not the end. The angel Metatron knows this because the angel Metatron has his book of life, his records of assignations and interactions, crossed paths, interlocked fates, destinies decreed when this world was still a speck of dust under his fingernail. And if the book of life records a meeting between two unkin somewhere, somewhen, not too far from here, those unkin can't be dead.

The palmtop boots up into a screen of scrolling glyphs; it's a bit outdated in these days of VR lenses and shimmering images, but he's always been a little old-school in his methods. He likes the feel of weathered leatherbound books, smooth plastic keys under his fingers, dirt under his fingernails, dust on his boots. He is Lord Earth, after all—En Ki, as he once wrote his name with wedge-shaped reeds pressed into clay, when he was just a lowly scribe, laying his master's laws and dictates down for all eternity. The rest of the unkin were all so quick to take the roles of warriors, heroes, kings, showing their lordship over the sky by calling down a storm.

Thunder and lightning, he thinks. Hawks and eagles. Back in the old days you couldn't walk a hundred miles without running into some self-appointed god of all the skies and heavens, god of air and grace, of airs and graces. For them the whole point of civilization was to take them further from the dirt that they were born in. For Enki, craftsman and technologist, father of irrigation and agriculture, civilization is made of dirt. Mathematics and writing began in shapes pressed into slick wet clay. Even now, now that he's Metatron, with four thousand years between him and that previous life, the scribe in him still likes the feel of something in his hand.

He frowns.

The Tablets of Destiny

The palmtop's flickering display stops at a screen of curlicues and arabesques, pictograms that represent not things but forces, vectors, the motion of a snake's tongue flicking out to taste the air, the tension in a lion's shoulder muscles as it's poised to leap, all tabulated into rows and columns like some child's puzzle, waiting for a circling pen to find the words spelled out forward and backward, upside-down, diagonally. In fact he reads it every way, this page of text, from left to right like English, right to left like Hebrew, top to bottom like Chinese, and spiraling inward to the central glyph like the Sumerian of his youth. The Arattan script can even be read diagonally, from the lower-left corner to the upper-right, or from right to left. But it's not the original text. And no matter which way he reads it, it doesn't make sense.

He can smell the girl's pain all round him. He can feel the boy's signature burning its way through the thick pages of the guest book. The palmtop should be picking all this up, mapping the moment, catching the currents of it like yarrow stalks falling into hexagrams. Instead, there's no sign of either of them in the text. It was clear enough two weeks ago, clear enough that he called the two gatherers in to question them for hours on what exactly they remembered. The boy was dead? The girl was as good as? They were certain?

“This is the only thing that's certain,” he had said, holding the book up in their faces.

He looks at it now and frowns. Destiny doesn't change.

The language has an agglutinative grammar at its heart. It doesn't need all the little joining words of English, all the ofs and tos and fors and bys. It doesn't need all the grammatical exoskeleton of Latin prefixes and suffixes around the words. It's just a matter of how you put the words together, one after the other after the other, except the block of text that's on the screen is less a linear statement than a map of all its possible meanings; it's not designed to be read in one direction, line by line, no more than you could understand a painting if you cut it into strips and scanned your eyes along each shred, reading the individual brushstrokes one by one and waiting for the meaning to emerge.

Whatever form it takes, leatherbound book of life, clay tablets of destiny, or law carved in stone—whatever medium the
me
are coded in, by nature, has to be a little more structurally complex to capture the sheer density of meaning in the unkin language. Any statement carries its context, implicit in the space between the words. But in the Cant graved on the screen there are no spaces, and the meaning blossoms outward from the central glyph, around it and back in, the context as explicit as the text.

It's the machine code of reality. It has to be precise.

And Metatron is worried, because for the first time in his long, long life, he doesn't understand it.