ARMIES STAND DOWN
CHARNI SPOKESMAN CLAIMS “MISUNDERSTANDING”
“I got your message,” Aiah tells the woman called Whore.
Whore raises eyelids heavy with dreaming, and with a languid hand she takes the copper plasm contact from her lips. “We sent you no message,” she says, “but we are pleased to see you here. If you will follow me, I will take you to Order of Eternity.”
Aiah tells her guards to wait in the lobby while she follows Whore into the sisters’ stone maze. As she passes through the first doorway she finds a pair of carved images gazing at her in the glow of the hanging lamps, dim light and trompe l’oeil artistry giving the faces a disturbing air of life. She knows the faces, Sorya and herself, The Shadow and The Apprentice, confronting each other across the corridor, one with a knife and the other looking up a recipe.
A metaphor, she admits, sufficient to describe their relationship.
She approaches an alcove where a dreaming sister lies, and Aiah’s nerves sing in surprise as the woman’s eyes open and turn to face the visitor. It is as startling an effect as if one of the imagoes’ eyes had opened. As Aiah continues through the corridor, the sister puts her plasm contact down, rises from her couch, and with a soft slap of bare feet on cool stones begins to follow Aiah along the winding path.
Another imago appears, The Architect, with Constantine’s stern face and powerful body superimposed on the image of the man holding the protractor and a pair of dividers, and with a shiver Aiah remembers that The Architect’s meaning is failure—noble aspirations gone wrong, crumbled into dust.
In the next alcove two sisters lie dreaming. As Aiah passes their eyes open, one set dark and one light, they turn to Aiah with an identical incurious gaze, and after she walks past they rise and follow.
Here is The Shadow again, Sorya’s predator eyes, her ambiguous smile. Another dreaming sister opens her eyes, watches Aiah go by, and then follows. Here is an imago called The Mage, and it has Rohder’s face, lined and youthful at once, lacking only his ruddy complexion. Aiah appears as The Apprentice again, and Constantine as The Architect. Two more dreaming sisters, one of them the genetically altered Avian Aiah had seen earlier, rise from their couch and follow. Aiah, following Whore, feels her neck prickle under the gaze of intent raptor eyes.
More dreaming sisters rise from their couches and follow Aiah, feet slapping on stone, faces impassive as sleepwalkers’.
Death. Aiah’s mind whirls, and she stops dead before the imago. It is Taikoen, a bodiless form, vaguely humanoid, somehow inscribed onto stone, its indistinct outlines fading into the dimly lit scene. As Aiah looks at the image, its contours actually seem to blur and shift, as if the plasm-creature was moving uneasily within its portrait. Terror throbs in Aiah’s throat. She looks wildly after Whore and sees her guide walking calmly away. Aiah almost runs after her.
Rohder, Sorya, Constantine, Aiah, and, stalking them all, Taikoen, Death. The forms repeat themselves again and again. More sisters rise from their alcoves to join the silent, dreamy throng that follow Aiah through the maze. Aiah doesn’t see a single Mage that isn’t Rohder, no Apprentice that isn’t Aiah. And then finally she sees a new face, the dreaming sister Order of Eternity, who waits for her calmly, seated on the mattress in one of the alcoves, legs dangling over the side, crossed at her delicate ankles.
“There is joy in the plasm now,” Order of Eternity says, the words coming in her girlish voice. “We have felt it. There is a change beginning, a change that moves through the heart of reality.”
“I thought you told me that nothing changes,” Aiah says.
“I said that no change is permanent. The change we feel may not last. But it is unlike anything any of us have experienced.” Her pale face lights with joy. “It is as if the plasm were singing to us. Singing of its pleasure.”
“I’ve been using plasm every day,” Aiah says. “I haven’t felt anything different.”
“Perhaps you are not listening.”
“I may not have listened, but I’ve seen,” Aiah says. “You put my face all over the sky, in one of the biggest plasm displays I’ve ever witnessed. Me and war and death. What was that about?”
The dreaming sister hesitates. She looks away, face sober beneath her pale cap of hair. “We have seen you in our meditations. The plasm displays are nothing we do, nothing we create consciously… They are reflections of our meditations, of what we feel in the plasm. And though we feel the plasm’s pleasure, we also sense, through our contemplation of the imagoes, that their present interaction is likely to lead to violence.”
“The plasm is pleased by the idea of war?”
The dreaming sister seems shocked. “No. Of course not. The plasm’s joy is in the present, and the war, if our visions are true, will be in the future. The war is not a dream, it is a nightmare, and it haunts us.”
“My face was all over the sky, and it’s all over this building. And other faces are repeating themselves, Sorya and Constantine and…”
“Yes.” Order of Eternity rises from her couch and takes a few thoughtful steps. “We are seeing the faces on the imagoes repeating one another. Every Apprentice is you, every Architect is the same man, the one with the braided hair. You are all important to the plasm, somehow. It has to do with the change that we sense, the plasm that sings to us, in us. This has not happened before, not in the memory of anyone here, and we suspect not in the history of our order.” “Death,” Aiah says.
The sister’s eyes turn hard. “Yes. We have felt that one, too, creeping about the plasm mains. An unholy thing, half-unreal, a perversion of plasm itself.”
“Help me kill it,” Aiah says.
Order of Eternity looks up at her, surprise on her face. “You can’t kill Death,” she says.
“This Death can be killed,” Aiah says. “And if it is perverting the plasm that is giving you such joy, you’ll want it destroyed.”
“We do not act,” insistently. “We contemplate. We observe the things that are, the things that are fundamental. We do nothing in the world. We do not kill, we do not undo, not even the things that are better undone.”
Aiah narrows her eyes as she looks at the smaller woman. Put it, she thinks, in their terms.
“Death,” Aiah says, “this Death, this particular Death, will bring down the Architect. The Architect, the Apprentice, and the Mage are changing the world, building something new, and the plasm is singing to you—the plasm itself is telling you that it approves of what the Architect is doing. If Death and the Shadow have their way, the war will come—the vision of war that haunts your dreams, the vision that you spread across the sky yesterday so the whole metropolis could share in your nightmare.”
Order of Eternity spreads her hands, gives Aiah a helpless look. “We do not do,” she says.
The sisters’ insistence grates on Aiah’s nerves. She, Aiah, has been on the front lines of one battle or another for months, and she has no patience left for those who can’t choose sides.