K-Machines Read online

  I found my voice. "What bullshit is this? Has Somebody up there given me a promotion? Med student one day, Vorpal homunculus the next. Then on the third day, after rising from the dead, they decide he's a god." I laughed, and it instantly stuck in my throat. After all, hardly more than a week earlier I had indeed been killed, then salvaged, somehow, in disgusting pain and anguish by a real god or reasonable facsimile, an Angel from the Omega Point at the culmination of a collapsing cosmos somewhere in the heartland of the Tegmark manifold. I wondered briefly where Cathooks had got to. Still running backward to the dawn of time, I supposed, like Merlin in that old book.

  "The new improved edition." His scorn was withering. I leaned forward, squinting.

  "Okay, I get it. You're one of these KKK-machines. Hey, aren't you morons meant to be wearing white sheets?"

  I guess I knew that he couldn't reach through the screen, seize me by the throat with hands and sinews of steel, and choke me until I was dead (again).

  "Impertinent insect." The K-machine was female, her face unchanged except for the subtlety worked in humans by the possession of an extra X chromosome rather than a Y, somehow crueler, more implacable and, if possible, still more ardently ferocious. Her hair was pulled back from her forehead, businesslike, and her dark suit fitted her exactly over a white blouse buttoned at the neck. It was frighteningly apparent that she still wished me dead. Passion blazed in her machine eyes. "The worlds are in a condition of Theomachy, and you attempt your feeble wit."

  "I have no idea what you are talking about, but you look to me like something a human being with feeble wits like mine cobbled together on a bench, then threw out in disgust, and it wandered off before the trash guys could haul it away." The thing said nothing. I said, "You still haven't told me what the K stands for. Our friend Fenimore here tells me it means Killer, it seems appropriate enough, you cold bitch."

  "Interesting. Perhaps you know more than your apparent ignorance discloses. We K-machines descend from Arbeiters, nanotechnological cornucopias, Santa Claus machines—"

  I think it was about to go on and tell me about its famous lineage, but, scared as I was, I burst out laughing.

  "Oh my God. You're K for Kris Kringle machines! This is like, what? Earn good money in computer repairs? Home study for the New Era?"

  "We are Kriegspiel machines," she told me, ignoring my feeble wit. "In that respect," she added, "you and I are alike. In no other." She shook her head in disbelief. " 'Cold'..." I could hear the inverted commas. I had no idea what the thing was talking about. For that matter, I had no idea what a Kriegspiel machine might be, except that it had a Teutonic sound to it, maybe Nazi, or maybe that was just my prejudice against killing machines showing. Schwellen. Jammervoch. Kriegspiel things. It was like a nightmare from the middle of the twentieth century. Fuck it anyway, this was all some sort of dream. Nightmare. Virtual performance conducted by James Cooper Fenimore—ridiculous, laughable name—in the lobby of the law library where I had no business being, halfway as I was between medicine and philosophy. Oh. Oh shit.

  "I was right. Fenimore is one of your creatures." No, really not, that made no sense at all. All right: "Was. Then he came over to our side, maybe the pay is better, excellent conditions, good working hours lugging machine corpses back to Ruth's lab through the mirror, but even so, you've still got your little backdoor links tucked in there under his rug. Poor devil. I'm starting to seriously wonder about my family."

  "Stop your maundering, Mr. Seebeck. Shut up and listen. This is information you need and that we wish you to possess. A most unusual concurrence of interests. It is unlikely to recur."

  I stayed perched on the padded edge of my imaginary chair, leaning forward in the dark, fascinated and repelled. This was something out of... I couldn't put my finger on it. Milton, maybe. Satan yacking to Archangel Michael or Uriel, whatever. Or perhaps an upmarket executive business negotiation. The thing had the appearance now of a small, feral, ten-year-old of ambiguous gender, which slightly undercut the effect, but it still wore the suit for the role.

  "Yeah, yeah. You've got ninety seconds to make your pitch, then I'm switching back to Gilmore Guys."

  "Memorize this." A complex image replaced the machine's face. There was no obvious focal point. I saw a bunch of circles annotated with words in different colors, lines connecting the circles. No time to take any of it in, although I had an instant, creepy, unconscious sense that names were there inscribed, names I recognized, or ought to. Decius, for one, in the upper-right corner. I had seen Decius just once, wrapped in what looked like a sheet from the bed, ablaze in glorious reflected light from the singularity at the end of time, the Omega Point, the fount of the godthings, the Angels. He had been a man of middle age attended by another, younger man, presumably not of the Seebeck clan, although who could say—our parents had apparently proliferated like rabbits.

  The image vanished. It hung for a moment in reversed afterimage against the empty screen. An instant later, the display flickered, showed me a library menu. Coop rose easily from his chair, pushed it aside, said, "Thank ye, sar. I'll be on my way now. If I see the cat, I'll be sure'n let him know you asked after the old fleabag."

  I let him go. Why not? I needed to do some more maundering, as the K-machine had called it, before I returned to Toby's world, and Lune. A young woman in pink overalls and a pink-edged overbite was waiting rather impatiently for access to the catalog and rather too closely to my elbow. I nodded to her, stepped away, bit my own lip, and went back out into the sun. The clock was now striking three; it was hotter than ever away from the shade, and the hard, dark shadows had lengthened visibly.

  Being footloose in infinite worlds was undeniably fun, and sharing the company of a brilliant, beautiful woman who gave every indication of being as madly in love with me as I was with her—what's not to like? A life of adventure, a whole new family of squabbling maniacs, creatures trying to kill me at every turn—who could wish for a more bracing fate? I had fallen into a comic strip. And nonetheless, something nagged at me, some foolish scrap of dissatisfaction. I stood stock-still, looked it in the eye, recognized it for what it was: homesickness. All this headlong rush and excitement and danger and passion, not to mention startling and unexpected insights into the nature of reality, it wore upon a man. I wanted to go home. And I couldn't. Yes, I could revisit that old house in Northcote, but all I'd find was ruin piled on ruin, smashed timber, shattered glass, piles of broken brick, and large pools of water where the aged pipes had snapped like old bones. Nothing there of home.

  I wandered in some confusion through the paths and one-way internal streets of the campus, head down, lost in a turmoil of thoughts and feelings that had no obvious resolution. I walked along Monash Road, headed east, mid-afternoon shadow preceding me, turned right instead of crossing into Faraday Street. A large, green tram rattled past in the middle of Swanston Street. That was comforting, somehow. It was a sound I associated with childhood, with my parents, with a safer time. My hand felt bare without the glove. I glanced up briefly to take my bearings at the Grattan Street lights. Green; I crossed. An uneasy sensation went through me like a chill. I couldn't put my finger on it. Chicago..? Up ahead, a van was parked outside a seedy office, sliding door pulled back. Two men struggled with some white-goods item, a refrigerator, maybe. I trudged along in the hot sun, glad that it was their job and not mine. One of them was short, stocky, dark-haired, the other was pudgy, red-faced, balding—incompetent, by the look of things. A dolly sat uselessly on the pavement. They had their tilted cargo jammed into the van's side opening, the back edge firmly planted in the black asphalt. They struggled frantically with it as I approached, muttering to one another, plainly at their wits' end. A familiar silly impulse took command of me. As I passed them, I leaned my head confidentially toward them and said, "You want to be careful there, fellas, you wouldn't want that thing to get stuck."

  I heard a noise like an explosive sneeze, glanced back over my shoulder. The red-faced man
had let go of the equipment, which remained jammed in place, and was leaning forward with his hands braced on his knees. The short man stared at him, then at me, and burst out laughing as well. They roared together. I gave them a cheeky wave and kept going, flushed with a curious gratification. Had I tried that little stunt in Chicago rather than Melbourne, one of the guys would have hit me or, worse still, said in a tone of affronted menace: "Excuse me?" I heard the last gusts of laughter at my back and knew I was home. My tight shoulders relaxed; I had not realized my tension. I needed a beer and maybe a game of pool with some guys I'd never met before upstairs in Johnny's Green Room. I glanced left, started to cross the road, and somebody tried to run me down.

  Even before I identified the car coming directly at me on the wrong side of the street, I was crouched, right arm extended and braced on my left hand, a word of power at my lips. A millimeter-wide beam of Force 12 wind struck the left front wheel, flung the car sideways. Another vehicle hit it, passing the wrong way on the other side of the street, flung it back toward me before veering away to pile into a parked car pointed in the wrong direction. Everything was wrong. I said the word that opened a pathway to the Sun. A middle-aged woman passenger was staring in hysterical fright at me through the windshield as the dented car came at me. The driver had disappeared. No. The numb, white-faced woman whose mouth was opening in a scream I could not hear was the driver, her hands gripping the driving wheel. I jerked my own hand aside, shut down the scorching solar fire, but the briefest burst of plasma at twice the melting point of steel had already licked one back wheel. The hub and axle glowed incandescent. Rubber and polyester cord burst into flames, evaporated instantly into stinking fumes.

  Somehow the gasoline tank failed to tear open and explode. The car crunched past me with millimeters to spare, hit the curb, bounced, spun away, jammed the fused, cooling wheel rim onto the tram tracks. A Prius. On the far side of the street, light traffic veered to avoid the Silver Top taxi that had hit my would-be murderer. I found myself back on the sidewalk, legs trembling, making sense of the senseless. Everyone was driving on the wrong side of the road. Nothing else had changed. The buildings were familiar, the overhead power lines, the neon signs on the scruffy shops, the tall spires of downtown office buildings a kilometer or two to the south. And people were driving on the left, like the Brits do even to this day, instead of the right—as we'd done, for that matter, before the Australian Republic was declared in the excitable days following the assassination of the American president, Bobby Kennedy.

  Whatever. Somehow I'd got myself in the wrong universe, and in my paranoid carelessness had come close to killing an innocent. At least my stupid mistake had not occurred in two or three hours' time, when this road would be thrumming with traffic heading in both directions as fast as they could manage. This time I looked right instead of left, saw an approaching car slow to avoid hitting the brutalized Prius, and then I ran to the driver's right-hand door. I wrenched it open, reached across her lap, slapped the release button on her seat belt, dragged her out of the car. The back axle was still dull red with heat. If the goddamn fuel tank had broken open during the several impacts, it could explode at any moment, just like in the movies. Luckily, I couldn't smell volatiles.

  I dragged the shocked, weeping woman across to the sidewalk, propped her on the ground against a dirty brick wall. People were coming out of buildings, agog, avid for some afternoon excitement. One in a cardigan and sensible skirt appeared to be a nurse, probably from the nearby school of nursing; she took charge of the distressed woman with a curt nod of thanks in my direction. A tall redhead youth in a backpack and a T-shirt informing us of the exploits of MUFF DIVERS—an engineering student, by the look of him—was explaining to a storekeeper that the car had been hit by lightning. The storekeeper glanced derisively at the empty blue sky. The student asked him haughtily if he'd ever heard of heat lightning and static discharge. I decided there was nothing I could do. I couldn't give the poor creature a new car, but probably her insurance would cover the damage. I walked away, feeling sick, wondering how the rules of the world could be changed behind your back, no notification required, history rewritten. For God's sake, it wasn't just the traffic regulations and rules of the road, somebody had jammed a completely new month into the calendar, and they'd named it after me.

  This wasn't my world any longer. And I missed my dog, Do Good, terribly.

  I looked around for a telephone box, but they don't make those anymore. I found a shadowed alcove, made sure nobody was watching me, opened a Schwelle, and stepped onto the low hill overlooking Toby's dwelling. Nothing tried to kill me, which made a nice change. I walked shakily down the hill, looking forward to a pot of tea and some scones. My brother Toby—assuming he were still alive, assuming he were at home, assuming he was still talking to me—had an arrangement with an excellent pastry cook in a conveniently time-dislocated world, and his strawberry jam and whipped cream were to die for, almost.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Exegetical Analects

  There is one who asks: What is the Tree?

  One answers: In the multiform variora of the Linkollew Scriptures, a single icon persists as universal, central, august in significance, potent in force: the Tree.

  The Tree is the Axis Mundi, the Omphalos or Navel of the Many Worlds, the Yggdrasil. It is the font of existence, the exfoliation of infinite realities, the trunk against which the Child braces his back, from whose great branch dangles the sublime and indifferent Hanged One.

  The Tree is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life.

  The Tree is the algorithm and the expression of healthful growth, of computational complexity: the essence of the K-machines.

  In the Tree is combined burgeoning abundance and responsive selection, activity and rest, left and right, back and forth, the uppermost and the lowermost, the green in the blue, root and leaf, death and life.

  In the Tree is joined Past, Present, and Future.

  The great Tree, the Yggdrasil, is the single thread winding through the haze of probabilities that is the greater Cosmos.

  The Tree is the Xon.

  There is one who asks: In whose martyred blood, ichor, and other circulating fluids is the Tree watered?

  One answers: Oh, get a grip.

  CHAPTER NINE

  August

  A yellowed scroll, possibly in vellum, unrolled at both ends and pinned to the wooden door of Toby's cottage by bright, new thumbtacks, asked me to forgive my brother's absence and invited me to make myself at home. The calligraphy was beautiful, hard, masculine, flowing without fuss. Beneath his words, Lune had added in ballpoint: "Sorry, called away on duty, back soon. I love you. L."

  I glanced over my shoulder at the autumnal peace of the glade. Nobody in sight, Golden, brown, yellow-green leaves blown everywhere, no sign of footprints or worse. I put my hand to the carved wooden doorknob, entered the place carefully. Too many people and things had been trying to kill me lately.

  An odor of black tea, warmth of coals in the fireplace. The indefinable emptiness that speaks of a deserted house. My mouth tasted sourly of burned Jammervoch, faintly disgusting now the humor of the moment had passed. I threw myself down in a. well-padded leather armchair, drew my knees one after the other up against my chest, unlaced my shoes, kicked them off. My socks stank, and so did my armpits, now that I thought about it. Fright does that to you, I've found. It has nothing to do with courage or resolve; the juices of the body rally to our need, and good for them, I say. I thought of taking a shower in one of Toby's miraculous bathrooms, but it wouldn't be as much fun without Lune. She didn't mind the stink of combat; actually, I think it turned her on. Nothing fastidious about my warrior love, I told myself, for all her doctorate in ontological computation, or computational ontology, whatever the hell that was. I reached down and peeled off my socks as well, wrinkling my nose. Sweat and a faint tang of chlorine. The air lazing from the fireplace felt good on my spread, naked toes. I leaned
back in the armchair.

  I woke with a jolt, looked about. Afternoon light came golden through mullioned windows. A lick of red flame stood above a fallen log in the fireplace; the crash of its settling had awakened me. The room smelled of me. Still nobody home. I went to the bathroom adjoining the guest bedroom Toby had made over to Lune and me, threw the rest of my clothes in a heap, doused myself for a quarter of an hour in warm down-flooding water from some tropical world far, far away.

  Toweled to a fresh rush of blood in my tingling skin, wide awake and hungry, I padded back naked into the living room. It was strange; I'd spent only a day or two in this household, had learned here my passion for Lune and hers for me, fought a creature at least as terrible as the Jammervoch, a thing built like a storm of wasps from a million small feral parts that came together in a single cruel mind, blew the filthy fucker into soot and stench with the power of the dreadful thing that had been embedded into the flesh of my palm. Yet the place already felt like home, or as near as I'd come to finding one since the deformers had destroyed the old house where I had lived with the being—could she truly be my mother?—masquerading as my Great-aunt Tansy. That was before I had learned that I was a lost piece, or perhaps Player, in the Contest of Worlds. Whatever that was. Too many unknowns. Nothing but confusion. No, unfair. Far more than that. My flesh sang with my infatuation, my besottedness, my love for Lune. That made it all worthwhile. I would pay the price of confusion, gladly.