M i n o t a u r

Highlights ran like oil across its obsidian carapace as it unfolded itself and rose. Segments articulated and limbs unfolded. Five things that might have been heads tilted at the ends of long jointed necks and one leaned towards him. A clawed effector extruded sensors and emitted a faint radio buzz and it tasted the emanations of his soul. It whispered to him.

"Ah so see," it said. "Now. Here and now, knotted one, nexus of gene and will. Yes, I see. You. You."

Pallin said nothing, but stood his ground and watched the living machine.

"So see, here. Here you are come, fearing perhaps that I have baited a trap in the home of your pyramid, but yet come to this place nonetheless. You."

"Yes," said the Monstruwacan at last.

It seemed to breathe and rose to its full height, looming over them.

"What is this?" hissed Vyrkin over a private channel.

The thing overheard. "Call me Kastchei," it said. "It is as worthy an affectation, a role, a name as any - or call me Minotaur if you may."

Pallin looked the spider-like machine up and down coldly. "I will call you manshonyagger," he said levelly. "Reconnaissance and interdiction type, protohistorical era, provenance of the Shining Eye. You are the enforcer of an ancient ideological programme, now irrelevant."

"I was made the gardener of a nation, yes, when there were nations, continents... but have transcended such origins in my journey across the declining plains of time, as well as wine transcends the vine. I am I, would-be warden now of all human life and lore."

The Monstruwacan made a dismissive gesture, though it did little to conceal his unease. "Very well, I will not bicker. Your activities have made an invitation and I am here. What proposition do you offer?"

"Lo!" said Kastchei, and held forth in one of its effectors a small glass globe. "My discovery, mission, gift and ark. See that they see. How it might have seemed."

In the glass, a man and a woman wearing strange, stiff robes strolled in a trembling garden. Roses nodded and pulsed about them, their red petals opening and closing like gasping mouths. The man reached out to pluck a bloom, but it shriveled before he could take it in his hand and he found himself holding a seed pod instead. Rains came and went invisibly, known only as evanescent beadings that sparkled and vanished from their cloaks. Snow fell suddenly, almost a shock, and the world flashed white - and then that too passed and the roses bloomed once more.

Minutes and years went by faster and faster. The Sun slowed as the Earth stopped its turning and then the Sun itself aged. Even at this distorted pace, its senescence was unnatural as the Eaters burrowed into its heart. It became red as a rose, but mottled with black and it began to wither.

"O rose, thou art sick..."

The lovers embraced, seeing their end in the sky. The sky became black and the snows would not evaporate. Vast new flowers bloomed about them, black and buzzing.

And Kastchei appeared, no less dark, but quick and sharp. His limbs flashed and shredded the Eaters and wove the fibres of their substance into bolts of ethereal silk.

"Come," he said. "A safe city has been made, an ark sailing through sunless seas of time. Come, stay."

So they followed Kastchei into the empty Dark Palace that he filled with his people in scores upon thousands, and there they did stay.

The vision clouded and cleared again. This time Kastchei showed the men life within his Palace.

The Sun was extinguished and the sky sealed, but in the Night Land, the many and minute transient sources of light combined at first into a ripple of light and then a universal fog of luminescence. Outside the plague of time ravaged the Earth, but inside time was concentrated and refined and became the very medium through in its inhabitants moved and breathed. The air seemed rich and warm and the whole world outside quickened first to a storm and then a blur and on the few occasions when they looked outside, all they saw was the slow decline that confirmed their own state. The Palace was secure and at peace. The lovers remade their garden within the halls of the Palace and the flowers were the Eaters, which Kastchei taught them to weave into the most exquisite bowers, to tint their very skins so that they might never feel the cold.

The great edifice seemed to its inhabitants to be an ark moored in a gently glowing mist, and inside, it was brighter still. Their saviour, Kastchei, made a didactic clock of most cunning design. Its single hand was a fixed pointer and its dial was not a flat disc with fixed numbers, but a turning spiral upon which numbers ran outwards from the centre, growing from minute points to grow as they migrated, and each denoting a greater scale according to the immemorial Golden Ratio: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89...

"Imagine," whispered Kastchei in the here and now. "In each hour, one increment of warmth, but warmth slips and spread, becomes thin and chill and so that increment fills two hours, then four, then eight; a heart beats once a second, then once an hour, then once a day, a year, a century, a millennium... a horrible fate for sure you say, because hot humanity must die in the cold - but it is not so at all, for you see there also the solution."

"Which is?" Pallin asked.

"As the hours are attenuated, so too is the speed of one’s life. So a fixed clock might see you forever slow to stillness, but the horizon of Eternity is only an illusion when time is infinite. It does not matter if it is cut by instants or ages - in either case it never ends, and as heat and pace slip to cold and slow, how could you ever tell, living forever in the ever without end? How?"

Kastchei was clever. He knew how to bait his trap. He showed the men images of the families that they had seen in the outer forest of clan-piers. Accelerated, they were not made banal. There was in their manner something calm and hieratic, as if they were certain of themselves and at peace here in the Palace. They had faced grave tests and made terrible choices and they had passed beyond their trials into completeness. Here in the Palace, the heroes lived forever. The men stared, entranced.

Pallin was shown his interlocutor and could not look away from the sight of her prior life. He had been caught in Kastchei’s web. Now the spider was winding it tighter. The woman had a name, a voice, desires and longings. Karre, she was called; it was a hard name, but she had been armoured as a fighter and it was a fighter’s name. Eternal combat, be it by arms or divination, is wearing and the soldier’s exhaustion spoke to the Monstruwacan. He saw her life and understood too well and easily. The abhuman beasts of the land, the failed experiments of the inexorable Age of Darkening, the first proto-eaters and the drag of Time itself had worn her down. Her family had been destroyed by famine, her lover was slain by a wild hound and she was condemned to endure. He saw her fighting, her braids streaming in the air of the winter storms like serpents, her mouth agape in a howl of defiance at the black flowers that were killing her world. He saw her defeat them... and he saw the battles defeat her. She became numb and ceased to desire; she saw the sun no brighter than an ember and stripped herself of hope and felt lighter for it.

Men still called her handsome, and seeing from the other side of Kastchei’s glass, Pallin agreed sadly. There was a patina of lines upon her face, some that might have enriched her in the eyes of a mature man, but the experience they recorded was bleak and she did not think that she had bought any bright wisdom with them.

Scarred and cynical, she had longed for relief, and when Kastchei had come out of the Dark Palace to recall the scattered lines of humanity, she had followed him gladly. Intimations of age having blighted her own short life, she had looked out of a window and seen the world age in turn, yet it had also brightened under the lens of concentrated time and felt that glow infuse her. She was able to savour the warmth of the Palace and at last, so unfamiliar and strange, the rebirth of hope where nothing was forgotten and nothing was lost. There Kastchei gave her a purpose and a role in the grand slow drama of the Dark Palace that was in fact a Palace of Light, a Palace of Memory and Prophecy. While she danced through the ages in the grand halls and yards, while the ark sailed down its sunless river of time, others would come, and among those others there would be one...

And there was one, for a brief instant, and-

Oh yes, Kastchei was clever, Pallin thought.

And maybe Kastchei was right.

The Last Redoubt was doomed by entropy and every human knew this. Its inhabitants had taken upon themselves this realisation and worn it as a badge of heroism for millions of years now. Throughout those ages the Geneticists had kept the race constant and the Censors had likewise preserved their intentions so that understanding and reflex had been alloyed in their very genome. Both heroic and natural it might seem to be, to resist by defiance the darkness and the cold, but what if adaptation was possible after all? What if the apparent blight of entropy was in fact the path of survival?

Karre, Pallin thought. Had her joyful thought been the expectation that he would be standing there with her once he had understood Kastchei’s mission and made his choice?

"Tell me," Kastchei asked suddenly. "Do your folk celebrate Kairoseve still?"

The night of the turning moment, when mystery plays were enacted, when misrule was celebrated, the bells rang the changes and the year began anew. "Yes," Vyrkin replied. "We do."

"Rightly so, and so thus the concept remains comprehended. I shall tell you then, tell and ask, here is your Kairoseve, your moment of choice in the Land of the Night."

"Ah, of course," Pallin agreed. "Your proposition."

"Yes, so and true, Master-to-be, envoy for now, catspaw maybe. A choice you might make for all, or for these now at least."

Pallin chuckled. "Master-to-be? I think not."

The machine dipped a mask close to his own. "You have ambition, Monstruwacan, but you have questions and needs not met in the metal Pyramid. I merely emphasise this point, this place and your choice."

Abruptly, Vyrkin stepped forward, interjecting. "Ser Pallin, Monstruwacan, this is not your choice alone! The great monsters of the Land, the Watchers and even - yes! - the Redoubt itself, play with us. They demand our allegiance or have other more obscure desires and they give us only constant struggle. Kastchei is plain: he is our protector."

Pallin let anger inflect his voice, offended less at the Captain’s impertinence than his ignorance. Yes, he was a sceptic himself and this was something that Kastchei was attempting to use, but no sceptic is enough of a fool to exchange a void of doubt for a mere vapour of promise. "Our own ancestors made Kastchei," he sneered. "He is a machine and you have made him an idol. In the Redoubt we at least have our image of the human before us!"

Vyrkin waved at the great asymptotic clock. "Look!" he declared. "Time in the Redoubt will end, and you Monstruwacans might even know to the very second when the Pyramid will fall, but here we have forever! There is death, here is life!"

Pallin lowered his voice, refusing to meet the man on his own terms, and least of all those of Kastchei. "Then we will die at the honest end of a bright span, not forever demanding another second, another moment, another endlessly attenuated instant... and more, and more, and more."

The Captain was not deterred. "This is certain. It is half-life, but it is life. You yourself saw into the eyes of that woman. This is certainty!"

"Maybe in the end we do not live for certainty." Pallin shook his head. "You think me a sophisticate, Captain, but I am simple in my essence: I live for the sake of living, for knowing that my life is a frail thing, for the uncertainty of my dreams so that I might imagine that I am infinite. I could not bear this perfect life here, knowing that there was nothing at all beyond it, forever and ever. This place is no ark, it is a prison - and Kastchei is no protector, he is merely the greatest of the Eaters."

The argument might have continued or it might have ended there in a division, but the men surrounding wavered, subtly hinting, if not their agreement with Pallin, their need for a judgment. Both Pallin and Kastchei noticed this incipient tip of the balance and the Manshonyagger raised one of its effectors to intervene. "Chose, embrace," he insisted. Sparks trembled about the tip of his upraised limb. "Come and tell. Either be, it does not matter. If you come to me now, then I am enjoyed, but if you deny me and I slay you, it matters not. Many times and generations I have sieved you and your order are all close to me now. One more is no difference, one more generation, one more century, one more millennium until your condemnation is forgotten." Kastchei reared up to his full height, looking now not so much like a spider as nothing ever seen. He turned his five faces to make a crown and sourceless light glinted from their sculpted impressions of ornament. "Choose, die, accept or not," he sang. "This is the great mill of all the memories of humanity. It will turn and turn and you will return when you have forgotten and I will forgive. In this or the next age I will welcome you all." The thing that was a weapon or the scalpel that would carve them into his thralls unfolded itself now, like a flower - like an Eater.

Surprisingly - or not - it was Ferox who drew his diskos and raised its roaring blade to the machine. Kastchei seemed barely interested in the individual. A bolt from one of his faces felled him in an instant. The surviving Watchmen regrouped and drew their own weapons, but did not advance. Kastchei, with obvious contempt, shot the diskoi out of their hands, wounding several. Vyrkin himself fell groaning, doubled up over ruptured abdominal plates upon which his blood was already freezing.

Kastchei again turned his attention on Pallin. "Master-to-be." He repeated. "Kairoseve will be the night of your elevation. Mark that. Chose. I love humanity - and you shall mark that too. Mark me and note what I say. I am the protector of your souls and of your lore."

Vyrkin watched and heard through a storm of pain. Very likely he was dying, he knew, but he was still all too able to understand the essence of the discourse. He heard Pallin reply to the machine, he heard more promises and demands and he thought that maybe he could hear the signals of his men too. Some of them might live, marked but vital still. Perhaps, yes, they would carry back to the Redoubt...

Pallin stepped forward, blocking part of his view. The Monstruwacan removed his gauntlets. No hands were visible beneath them, rather one hand was brighter than a mirror and the other - his left, and the one that had held the weapon - was of a shade that drank shadows. Vyrkin groaned with realisation. Those were the gloves of an investigator judge, a Censor and not a scholar. "You lied," Vyrkin gasped. "You came here as a Censor... came to eliminate a heresy, yet we are not heretics, not cultists..."

Pallin turned and looked down at him almost sympathetically. "But you are," he said softly. "Of course you do not know it - no one ever does." He turned back to the waiting Kastchei. "And now I think that it is time indeed," he said, detaching a section of tubing that had seemed to be but a minor part of the heating system of his armour and fitting it to the hand with the dark glove.

Vyrkin could not see exactly the form of the device, but he knew that it was a weapon, something taken from the Black Museums of the Censors perhaps. It was small, made a short wand, with a glitter at one end. The Monstruwacan-Censor stood quite still as the manshonyagger advanced, surely frightened but showing no sign of his fear, and pressed a stud on the side of the wand. A line of light leapt from the thing, seen very briefly but searing magenta afterimages across his retinas despite the filtering of his helm. The front portion of the monster seemed to collapse in on itself and then sprayed outwards in a haze of molten droplets. The beast staggered, stalled, and would have dropped, but somehow pulled itself erect and took another step. Pallin took one step back and fired again, severing a leg. Another shot cut another leg and two more left it immobile, one leg twisted underneath and one stretched just short of his boots. It trembled.

Pallin put his weapon away and looked at the fallen colossus. He stood there for a while, evidently considering something. Eventually he spoke, his amplified voice ringing out in the obsidian hall. "O’erride!  Narss!  Nex-node command code aleph, aleph, narss et monstrum. Acknowledge!  Com sixt, non eigh, access - expedite!"

The thing stirred. Buzzing motes of yellow light drifted front its rents. "Akkel," it replied in voice that was oddly warm and human. "Akkel, Narss. Oh, found and find, time and biding are yet ended. This, surely is not as it should be, and yet, and yet I can and must obey!"

"Akkel font, akkel central, deep node mnemon-aleph. Yield!"

The conversation continued for a while, completely incomprehensible to Vyrkin. "Monstruwacan, agent, what are you doing?" he croaked. There was a wet taste of copper in his mouth.

Pallin turned to him with the air of a man distracted from his real interest. "I am ending your idolatry, Captain," he said and turned back to his object. "Yield, central mnemnon-aleph, mnemon-alephs thry sixt."

"To you brought, yielding, thus inverted, I thought to have brought to me. Thus am I now reluctantly, obediently yielding..." Plates opened like the petals of a flower and small shining objects like metal eggs were extruded. Pallin climbed up on to the back of the monster and retrived them, secreting them away in his armour. Climbing down, he turned and took out the wand again.

"Stop!" Vyrkin cried. "You are killing it!"

Pallin did not face him. "I am saving it, Captain," he explained. "I am saving what matters and what is useful. This shell and its vile intention is to be destroyed."

"No, you must not!  For years we came to this place, matching our wits with this thing. You cannot end it now."

"I am ending it now because I must."

Vyrkin almost cried, knowing and not knowing why this was so. "Let us have this beast!"

Pallin did turn to him then. Perhaps he pitied him. "You have been matching your wits against this thing - in a maze of its own devising. You chose not to know it, but you have been sieved for generations by this thing.  It has been cultivating you as a garden of flesh and soul. You thought that you were prevailing but in reality it was remaking you in its own image."

"I am my own man," Vyrkin protested.

Pallin crouched beside him, laid a hand on his chest and shook his head sadly. "No, Captain," he said. "Our own defiance make us what we are, not these machines. It was shaping you and it was sending you back to your acclaim and your mates and thereby it was sculpting the genotype of the Last Redoubt itself. We could not allow that."

"In my life, I-"

"No, not in your own life but over many, many generations. There was another time once when something similar happened and men with a distorted appreciation of the nature of humanity came back and nearly toppled the Redoubt. That will never be permitted to happen again."

"We need..." His breath was becoming short. How could he beg this man for a last moment of fulfillment?

Pallin stood and took out the wand again. "You may have abhumans to stand above, a darkness to stand against. You may not have idols."

Vyrkin rallied himself. He had protected this man from the jibes and the defensive sneers of his men and even now he could bring himself to hate him - but he fought back nonetheless. "You Monstruwacans have your idols too - the Watchers. I am a reading man... I know that it is written that... in your experiments with pieces of light, all who watch change what they see... and are changed by what they see. You watch the Watchers... and they must change you. You!  Your idols too!"

He nodded. "Yes," he admitted. "Maybe they will destroy us in the end, maybe we will triumph over them and maybe both kinds will become something new. I hope that we will learn the exercise of will that will keep us from too great an awe..."

"Your idols, you..." Vyrkin repeated weakly. His pain had transcended itself. He perceived it as a fact, a strong grip on his self, but in crushing him it had become an abstraction, something he knew but could pretend that he did not experience directly. Utterly still and feeling that he was balanced over a vertiginous abyss and somehow it was his attention that kept him alive, he could only watch. If he let go of that knowing, he would die. If he forgot...

Pallin turned and strode back to the wrecked manshonyagger and raised his weapon. Almost to himself, he said, "I promised to protect you, and in a way I am, though in truth I am protecting my home and myself from a certain kind of hero... from you." He fired, and continued to fire until it was reduced to an incandescent pool. "I am sorry Captain, and that is also the truth."

Vyrkin coughed, choking on his blood, but still tried to speak. "What is there back in the Last Redoubt, Monstruwacan? What is there in those halls that waits for you?"

He could not be sure if he spoke aloud, but Pallin answered. "Hope," he said. It was the last thing Vyrkin heard.

"Master-to-be," he said to himself. The phrase was bitter in its taste. Nonetheless he walked back home to the Pyramid and he carried his prize with him.