“I didn’t think of this place until after,” he lies. Then, to atone: “And I don’t know how you got out.”
“Yes you do, Myles. You do it yourself all the time.”
“Go on,” he says, deliberately.
She smiles, but it doesn’t last. “We got here the same way, Myles. We copied ourselves from one address to another. The only difference is, you still have to go from A to B to C. I just cut straight to Z.”
“I can’t accept that,” Thomas says.
“Ever the doubter, aren’t you? How can you enjoy heaven when you can’t even recognise it?” Finally, she looks up at him. “You should be told the difference between empiricism and stubbornness, Doctor. Know what that’s from?”
He shakes his head.
“Oh well. It’s not important.” She looks back at the ground. Wet tendrils of hair hang across her face. “They wouldn’t let me come to the funeral.”
“You don’t seem to need their permission.”
“Not now. That was a few days ago. I still hadn’t worked all the bugs out then.” She plunges one hand into wet dirt. “You know what I did to him.”
Before the knife, she means.
“I’m not—I don’t really—”
“You know,” she says again.
Finally he nods, although she isn’t looking.
The rain falls harder. Thomas shivers under his windbreaker. Fitzgerald doesn’t seem to notice.
“So what now?” he asks at last.
“I’m not sure. It seemed so straightforward at first, you know? I loved Stuart, completely, without reservation. I was going to bring him back as soon as I learned how. I was going to do it right this time. And I still love him, I really do, but damn it all I don’t love everything about him, you know? He was a slob, sometimes. And I hated his taste in music. So now that I’m here, I figure, why stop at just bringing him back? Why not, well, fine-tune him a bit?”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m going through all the things I’d change, and when it comes right down to it maybe it’d be better to just start again from scratch. Less—intensive. Computationally.”
“I hope you are delusional.” Not a wise thing to say, but suddenly he doesn’t care. “Because if you’re not, God’s a really callous bastard.”
“Is it,” she says, without much interest.
“Everything’s just information. We’re all just subroutines interacting in a model somewhere. Well nothing’s really all that important then, is it? You’ll get around to debugging Stuart one of these days. No hurry. He can wait. It’s just microcode, nothing’s irrevocable. So nothing really matters, does it? How could God give a shit about anything in a universe like that?”
Jasmine Fitzgerald rises from the grave and wipes the dirt off her hands. “Watch it, Myles.” There’s a faint smile on her face. “You don’t want to piss me off.”
He meets her eyes. “I’m glad I still can.”
“Touché.” There’s still a twinkle there, behind her soaked lashes and the runnels of rainwater coursing down her face.
“So what are you going to do?” he asks again.
She looks around the soaking graveyard. “Everything. I’m going to clean the place up. I’m going to fill in the holes. I’m going to rewrite Planck’s constant so it makes sense.” She smiles at him. “Right now, though, I think I’m just going to go somewhere and think about things for a while.”
She steps off the mound. “Thanks for not telling on me. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but I appreciate the thought. I won’t forget it.” She begins to walk away in the rain.
“Jaz,” Thomas calls after her.
She shakes her head, without looking back. “Forget it, Myles. Nobody handed me any miracles.” She stops, then, turns briefly. “Besides, you’re not ready. You’d probably just think I hypnotised you or something.”
I should stop her, Thomas tells himself. She’s dangerous. She’s deluded. They could charge me with aiding and abetting. I should stop her.
If I can.
She leaves him in the rain with the memory of that bright, guiltless smile. He’s almost sure he doesn’t feel anything pass through him then. But maybe he does. Maybe it feels like a ripple growing across some stagnant surface. A subtle reweaving of electrons. A small change in the way things are.
I’m going to clean the place up. I’m going to fill in the holes.
Myles Thomas doesn’t know exactly what she meant by that. But he’s afraid that soon—far too soon—there won’t be anything wrong with this picture.
A WORD FOR HEATHENS
I am the hand of God. His Spirit fills me even in this desecrated place. It saturates my very bones, it imbues my sword-arm with the strength of ten. The cleansing flame pours from my fingertips and scours the backs of the fleeing infidels. They boil from their hole like grubs exposed by the dislodging of a rotten log. They writhe through the light, seeking only darkness. As if there could be any darkness in the sight of God—did they actually think He would be blind to the despoiling of a place of worship, did they think He would not notice this wretched burrow dug out beneath His very altar?
Now their blood erupts steaming from the blackened crusts of their own flesh. The sweet stink of burning meat wafts faintly through my filter. Skin peels away like bits of blackened parchment, swirling in the updrafts. One of the heathens lurches over the lip of the hole and collapses at my feet. Look past the faces, they told us on the training fields, but today that advice means nothing; this abomination has no face, just a steaming clot of seared meat puckered by a bubbling fissure near one end. The fissure splits, revealing absurdly white teeth behind. Something between a whine and a scream, barely audible over the roar of the flames: Please, maybe. Or Mommy.
I swing my truncheon in a glorious backhand. Teeth scatter across the room like tiny dice. Other bodies crawl about the floor of the chapel, leaving charred bloody streaks on the floor like the slime trails of giant slugs. I don’t think I’ve ever been so overpowered by God’s presence in my life. I am Saul, massacring the people of Amolek. I am Joshua butchering the Amorites. I am Asa exterminating the Ethiopians. I hold down the stud and sweep the room with great gouts of fire. I am so filled with divine love I feel ready to burst into flame myself.
“Praetor!”
Isaiah claps my shoulder from behind. His wide eyes stare back at me, distorted by the curve of his faceplate. “Sir, they’re dead! We need to put out the fire!”
For the first time in what seems like ages I notice the rest of my guard. The prefects stand around the corners of the room as I arranged them, covering the exits, the silver foil of their uniforms writhing with fragments of reflected flame. They grip not flamethrowers, but dousers. Part of me wonders how they could have held back; how could anyone feel the Spirit in this way, and not bring down the fire? But the Spirit recedes in me even now, and descending from that peak I can see that God’s work is all but finished here. The heathens are dead, guttering stick-figures on the floor. Their refuge has been cleansed, the altar that once concealed it lies toppled on the floor where I kicked it just—
Was it only a few minutes ago? It seems like forever.