Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality.
He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction.
Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity.
Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals.
He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together.
He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.
… When he got to the garden he recognised it, and wondered if his future self would, but thought probably not. The rotunda was on the side of a small hill, surrounded by tall trees, manicured bushes and rounded, well-kempt lawns. A stream ran through the small valley, and a path led towards the towered house in the distance, through the formal hedge-garden.
He got to the vault and found that he held nothing in his arms after all, that his own naked self had been all there ever was, and knew he had always known that. There would be no other, no remainder or survivor who would walk away again afterwards.
He stood a while at the doorway to the rotunda, drinking in the place where he would lie down to die and something else would rise. It was not his home, not his clan's territory, not really part of anything or anywhere that he knew except that it was upon Earth, and fashioned by and for his own species, and so was part of his own and his ancestors and his descendants' aesthetic and intellectual inheritance.
It would, he told himself, have to do.
He wondered again what it was he was supposed to do, what message he was supposed to carry; he had hoped that at some point during all that had passed he might have discovered what the signal he was supposed to act as carrier for actually was, but in this he had been disappointed, if mildly; he had not really expected that to be part of the process. Still, it would have been nice to have known.
He looked around again, knowing that he had lived many lives, and each of them well beyond the term the vast majority of his forbears would have called a natural span, and knowing that he lived on, in a sense, elsewhere, but for all that he still experienced a feeling of regret at leaving the world, however foolish and ultimately trivial it all was, and could not help but let that reluctance detain him, just a few moments longer, to gaze upon the represented face of this small, pleasant garden, and still know that for now, for this moment — which whatever happened in the future always would have happened and always would have contained him — he was alive.
Then he approached the vault and entered it, stepping through the neat wall of cabinets and into one where something — he had no idea what or whom, but hoped they had the best of him, somehow, and that that would help them fulfil whatever their purpose was — would soon be born.
And so he fell asleep, to wake.
4
'Shall we go?' the girl asked, shaking the man with the bloody nose. Gadfium started to nod, but the ape-man jumped down from the mammoth, ran to its trunk, took the end of it and then led the mammoth over to the girl. He squatted in front of her and looked up into her eyes. He extended the hairy hand holding the tip of the beast's trunk towards her.
'Relative of yours?' Oncaterius asked, snorting blood.
The girl said nothing. She stared into the ape-man's eyes as he whimpered and made little nodding motions and continued to offer his hand and the mammoth's trunk.
Slowly, the girl put out her hand.
When their hands touched, the little ape-man and the mammoth both disappeared and Gadfium found herself sitting on the ice, looking around, unhurt but still stunned. The girl shivered once. Then she blinked and turned to the man whose collar she held.
'Come on, Quolier, we have a meeting to attend.'
Adijine stared at the desk screen. 'What,' he said, slowly and calmly, 'the fuck is going on?'
The Security colonel's face looked grey. He winced a little. 'Ah, well, sir, we're not entirely sure. There seems to be some sort of, ah, problem associated with the Cryptosphere's error-checking protocols. We are in the process of switching to back-up electronic systems where possible but the interfaces are exhibiting crash tendencies under apparent parity contradictions. Ah…'
'Again, colonel,' the King said, drumming his fingers on the table top. 'In Clear.'
'Well, sir, the situation is somewhat uncertain, but there does appear to be some sort of violent, and, ah, virulent localised contamination centred around the Security unit in Oubliette but which has spread within the fabric of the main structure as far as the outer wall and intermittently elsewhere. We did conjecture that these phenomena might represent some sort of post-armistice sneak attack by the Chapel but they would appear to be having similar and related problems and therefore this hypothesis has been abandoned.'
'I see, I think,' Adijine said, looking around the state room as the lights flickered and the desk screen display wavered. 'And what was the last we heard from Oubliette?'
'Consistorian Oncaterius was in projected attendance interviewing the asura suspect. Then a disturbance was reported, first in the Cryptosphere and then in base-reality. Back-up Security units are on their way to the focus of the disturbance, though we are experiencing a degree of difficulty in maintaining contact with them. Reports are confused, sir.'
'As are we all, it would seem,' the King said, sitting back in his chair. 'Any further news from the fast-tower?'
'The situation was under control, last we heard, sir."
'And you were fighting — let me get this clear — birds?'
'Chimeric lammergeiers, sir. The sub-species believed responsible for and certainly associated with some of the Cryptospheric anomalies over the last few days. A number of them were successfully eliminated.'
'There was talk of a balloon.'
'An antique vacuum balloon appears to have been released.'
'Manned?'
'We are not certain, sir. Reports —'
'— are confused,' Adijine sighed. 'Thank you, colonel. Keep me informed."
'Sir.'
Adijine left the screen on. He removed his crown and put it back on again, then tried to crypt.