Grist
Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even when they come very late still come at the right time.
—Martin Heidegger,
Letter on Humanism
Midnight Standard at the Westway Diner
STANDING OVER ALL CREATION, a doubt-ridden priest took a piss.
He shook himself, looked between his feet at the stars, then tabbed his pants closed. He flushed the toilet, and centrifugal force took care of the rest.
Andre Sud walked back to his table in the Westway Diner. He padded over the living fire of the plenum, the abyss—all of it—and hardly noticed. Even though this place was special to him, it was really just another café with a see-through floor—a window as thin as paper and as hard as diamond. Dime a dozen, as they used to say a thousand years ago. The luciferin sign at the entrance said FREE DELIVERY. The sign under it said OPEN 24 HRS. This sign was unlit. The place will close, eventually.
The priest sat down and stirred his black tea. He read the sign, backward, and wondered if the words he spoke, when he spoke, sounded anything like English used to. Hard to tell with the grist patch in his head.
Everybody understands one another on a general level, Andre Sud thought. Approximately more or less they know what you mean.
There was a dull greasy gleam to the napkin holder. The saltshaker was half-full. The laminate surface of the table was worn through where the plates usually sat. The particle board underneath was soggy. There was free-floating grist that sparkled like mica within the wood: used-to-be-cleaning grist, entirely shorn from the restaurant’s controlling algorithm and nothing to do but shine. Like the enlightened pilgrim of the Greentree Way. Shorn and brilliant.
And what will you have with that hamburger?
Grist. Nada y grist. Grist y nada.
I am going through a depression, Andre reminded himself. I am even considering leaving the priesthood.
Andre’s pellicle—the microscopic algorithmic part of him that was spread out in the general vicinity—spoke as if from a long way off.
This happens every winter. And lately with the insomnia. Cut it out with the nada y nada. Everything’s physical, don’t you know.
Except for you, Andre thought back.
He usually thought of his pellicle as a little cloud of algebra symbols that followed him around like mosquitoes. In actuality it was normally invisible, of course.
Except for us, the pellicle replied.
All right, then. As far as we go. Play a song or something, would you?
After a moment, an oboe piped up in his inner ear. It was an old Greentree hymn—“Ponder Nothing”—that his mother had hummed when he was a kid. Brought up in the faith. The pellicle filtered it through a couple of variations and inversions, but it was always soothing to hear.
There was a way to calculate how many winters the Earth-Mars Diaphany would get in an Earth year, but Andre never checked before he returned to the seminary on his annual retreat, and they always took him by surprise, the winters did. You wake up one day and the light has grown dim.
The café door slid open and Cardinal Filmbuff filled the doorway. He was wide and possessive of the doorframe. He was a big man with a mane of silver hair. He was also space-adapted and white as bone in the face. He wore all black with a lapel pin in the shape of a tree. It was green, of course.
“Father Andre,” said Filmbuff from across the room. His voice sounded like a Met cop’s radio. “May I join you?”
Andre motioned to the seat across from him in the booth. Filmbuff walked over with big steps and sat down hard.
“Isn’t it late for you to be out, Morton?” Andre said. He took a sip of his tea. He’d left the bag in too long and it tasted twiggy.
I was too long at the pissing, thought Andre.
“Tried to call you at the seminary retreat center,” Filmbuff said.
“I’m usually here,” Andre replied. “When I’m not there.”
“Is this place still the seminary student hangout?”
“It is. Like a dog returneth to its own vomit, huh? Or somebody’s vomit.”
A waiter drifted toward them. “Need menus?” he said. “I have to bring them because the tables don’t work.”
“I might want a little something,” Filmbuff replied. “Maybe a lhasi.”
The waiter nodded and went away.
“They still have real people here?” said Filmbuff.
“I don’t think they can afford to recoat the place.”
Filmbuff gazed around. He was like a beacon. “Seems clean enough.”
“I suppose it is,” said Andre. “I think the basic coating still works and that just the complicated grist has broken down.”
“You like it here.”
Andre realized he’d been staring at the swirls in his tea and not making eye contact with his boss. He sat back, smiled at Filmbuff. “Since I came to seminary, Westway Diner has always been my home away from home.” He took a sip of tea. “This is where I got satori, you know.”
“So I’ve heard. It’s rather legendary. You were eating a plate of mashed potatoes.”
“Sweet potatoes, actually. It was a vegetable plate. They give you three choices, and I chose sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”
“I never cared for them.”
“That is merely an illusion. Everyone likes them sooner or later.”
Filmbuff guffawed. His great head turned up toward the ceiling, and his copper eyes flashed in the brown light. “Andre, we need you back teaching. Or in research.”
“I lack faith.”
“Faith in yourself.”
“It’s the same thing as faith in general, as you well know.”
“You are a very effective scholar and priest to be so racked with doubt. Makes me think I’m missing something.”
“Doubt wouldn’t go with your hair, Morton.”
The waiter came back. “Have you decided?” he said.
“A chocolate lhasi,” Filmbuff replied firmly. “And some faith for Father Andre here.”
The waiter stared for a moment, nonplussed. His grist patch hadn’t translated Cardinal Filmbuff’s words or had reproduced them as nonsense.
The waiter must be from out the Happy Garden Radial, Andre thought. Most of the help was in Seminary Barrel. There’s a trade patois and a thousand long-shifted dialects out that way. Clan-networked LAPs poor as churchmice and no good Broca grist to be had for Barrel wages.
“Iye ftip,” Andre said to the waiter in the Happy Garden patois. “It is a joke.” The waiter smiled uncertainly. “Another shot of hot water for my tea is what I want,” Andre said. The waiter went away looking relieved. Filmbuff’s aquiline presence could be intimidating.
“There is no empirical evidence that you lack faith,” Filmbuff said. It was a pronouncement. “You are as good a priest as there is. We have excellent reports from Triton.”
Linsdale, Andre thought. Traveling monk, indeed. Traveling stool pigeon was more like it. I’ll give him hell next conclave.
“I’m happy there. I have a nice congregation, and I balance rocks.”
“Yes. You are getting a reputation for that.”
“Triton has the best gravity for it in the solar system.”
“I’ve seen some of your creations on the merci. They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“What happens to them?”
“Oh, they fall,” said Andre, “when you stop paying attention to them.”
The chocolate lhasi came and the waiter set down a self-heating carafe of water for Andre. Filmbuff took a long drag at the straw and finished up half his drink.
“Excellent.” He sat back, sighed, and burped. “Andre, I’ve had a vision.”
“Well, that’s what you do for a living.”
“I saw you.”
“Was I eating at the Westway Diner?”
“You were falling through an infinite sea of stars.”
The carafe bubbled, and Andre poured some water into his cup before it became flat from all the air being boiled out. The hot water and lukewarm tea mingled in thin rivulets. He did not stir.
“You came to rest in the branches of a great tree. Well, you crashed into it, actually, and the branches caught you.”
“Yggdrasill?”
“I don’t think so. This was a different tree. I’ve never seen it before. It is very disturbing because I thought there was only the One Tree. This tree was just as big, though.”
“As big as the World Tree? The Greentree?”
“Just as big. But different.” Filmbuff looked down at the stars beneath their feet. His eyes grew dark and flecked with silver. Space-adapted eyes always took on the color of what they beheld. “Andre, you have no idea how real this was. Is. This is difficult to explain. You know about my other visions, of the coming war?”
“The Burning of the One Tree?”
“Yes.”
“It’s famous in the Way.”
“I don’t care about that. Nobody else is listening. In any case, this vision has placed itself on top of those war visions. Right now, being here with you, this seems like a play to me. A staged play. You. Me. Even the war that’s coming. It’s all a play that is really about that damn Tree. And it won’t let me go.”
“What do you mean, won’t let you go?”
Filmbuff raised his hands, palms up, to cradle an invisible sphere in front of him. He stared into this space as if it were the depths of all creation, and his eyes became set and focused far away. But not glazed over or unaware.
They were so alive and intense that it hurt to look at him. Filmbuff’s physical face vibrated when he was in trance. It was a slight effect, and unnerving even when you were used to it. He was utterly focused, but you couldn’t focus on him. There was too much of him there for the space provided. Or not enough of you.
I am watching chronological quantum transport in the raw, Andre thought. The instantaneous integration of positronic spin information from up-time sifted through the archetypical registers of Filmbuff’s human brain.
And it all comes out as metaphor.
“The Tree is all burnt out now,” Filmbuff said, speaking out of his trance. His words were like stones. “The Burning’s done. But it isn’t char that I’m seeing, no.” He clenched his fists, then opened his palms again. “The old Tree is a shadow. The burnt remains of the One Tree are really only the shadow of the other tree, the new Tree. It’s like a shadow the new Tree casts.”
“Shadow,” Andre heard himself whispering. His own hands were clenched in a kind of sympathetic vibration with Filmbuff.
“We are living in the time of the shadow,” said Filmbuff. He relaxed a bit. “There’s almost a perfect juxtaposition of the two trees. I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my life.”
Filmbuff, for all his histrionics, was not one to overstate his visions for effect. The man who sat across from Andre was only the aspect—the human portion—of a vast collective of personalities. They were all unified by the central being; the man before him was no more a puppet than was his enthalpic computing analog soaking up energy on Mercury, or the nodes of specialized grist spread across human space decoding variations in antiparticle spins as they made their way backward in time. But he was no longer simply the man who had taught Andre’s Intro to Pastoral Shamanism course at seminary. Ten years ago, the Greentree Way had specifically crafted a Large Array of Personalities to catch a glimpse of the future, and Filmbuff had been assigned to be morphed.
I was on the team that designed him, Andre thought. Of course, that was back when I was a graduate assistant. Before I Walked on the Moon.
“The vision is what’s real.” Filmbuff put the lhasi straw to his mouth and finished the rest of it. Andre wondered where the liquid went inside the man. Didn’t he run on batteries or something? “This is maya, Andre.”
“I believe you, Morton.”
“I talked to Erasmus Kelly about this,” Filmbuff continued. “He took it on the merci to our Interpreter’s Freespace.”
“What did they come up with?”
Filmbuff pushed his empty glass toward Andre. “That there’s a new Tree,” he said.
“How the hell could there be a new Tree? The Tree is wired into our DNA like sex and breathing. It may be sex and breathing.”
“How should I know? There’s a new Tree.”
Andre took a sip of his tea. Just right. “So there’s a new Tree,” he said. “What does that have to do with me?”
“We think it has to do with your research.”
“What research? I balance rocks.”
“From before.”
“Before I lost my faith and became an itinerant priest?”
“You were doing brilliant work at the seminary.”
“What? With the time towers? That was a dead end.”
“You understand them better than anyone.”
“Because I don’t try to make any sense of them. Do you think this new Tree has to do with those things?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt everything.”
“The time towers are bunch of crotchety old LAPs who have disappeared up their own asses.”
“Andre, you know what I am.”
“You’re my boss.”
“Beside that.”
“You’re a manifold. You are a Large Array of Personalities who was specially constructed as a quantum-event detector—probably the best in human history. Parts of you stretch across the entire inner solar system, and you have cloud ship outriders. If you say you had a vision of me and this new Tree, then it has to mean something. You’re not making it up. Morton, you see into the future, and there I am.”
“There you are. You are the Way’s expert on time. What do you think this means.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” said Andre. That the new Tree is obviously a further stage in sentient evolution, since the Greentree is us?”
“That’s what Erasmus Kelly and his people think. I need something more subtle from you.”
“All right. It isn’t the time towers that this has to do with.”
“What then?”
“You don’t want to hear this.”
“You’d better tell me anyway.”
“Thaddeus Kaye.”
Filmbuff shrugged. “Thaddeus Kaye is dead. He killed himself. Something was wrong with him, poor slob.”
“I know you big LAPs like to think so.”
“He was perverted. He killed himself over a woman, wasn’t it?”
“Come on, Morton. A pervert hurts other people. Kaye hurt himself.”
“What does he have to do with anything, anyway?”
“What if he’s not dead? What if he’s just wounded and lost? You understand what kind of being he is, don’t you, Morton?”
“He’s a LAP, just like me.”
“You only see the future, Morton. Thaddeus Kaye can affect the future directly, from the past.”
“So what? We all do that every day of our lives.”
“This is not the same. Instantaneous control of instants. What the merced quantum effect does for space, Thaddeus Kaye can do for time. He prefigures the future. Backward and forward in time. He’s like a rock that has been dropped into a lake.”
“Are you saying he’s God?”
“No. But if your vision is a true one, and I know that it is, then he could very well be the war.”
“Do you mean the reason for the war?”
“Yes, but more than that. Think of it as a wave, Morton. If there’s a crest, there has to be a trough. Thaddeus Kaye is the crest and the war is the trough. He’s something like a physical principle. That’s how his integration process was designed. Not a force, exactly, but he’s been imprinted on a property of time.”
“The Future Principle?”
“All right. Yes. In a way, he is the future. I think he’s still alive.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I didn’t until you told me your vision. What else could it be? Unless aliens are coming.”
“Maybe aliens are coming. They’d have their own Tree. Possibly.”
“Morton, do you see aliens coming in your dreams?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
Filmbuff put his hands over his eyes and lowered his head. “I’ll tell you what I still see,” he said in a low rumble of a voice like far thunder. “I see the burning Greentree. I see it strung with a million bodies, each of them hung by the neck, and all of them burning, too. Until this vision, that was all I was seeing.”
“Did you see any way to avoid it?”
Filmbuff looked up. His eyes were as white as his hands when he spoke. “Once. Not now. The quantum fluctuations have all collapsed down to one big macroreality. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.”
Andre sighed. I believe, he thought. I don’t want to believe, but I do. It’s easy to have faith in destruction.
“I just want to go back to Triton and balance rocks,” he said. “That’s really all that keeps me sane. I love that big old moon.”
Filmbuff pushed his lhasi glass even farther away and slid out of the booth. He stood up with a creaking sound, like vinyl being stretched. “Interesting times,” he spoke to the café. “Illusion or not, that was probably the last good lhasi I’m going to have for quite a while.”
“Uh, Morton?”
“Yes, Father Andre?”
“You have to pay up front. They can’t take it out of your account.”
“Oh, my.” The cardinal reached down and slapped the black cloth covering his white legs. He, of course, had no pockets. “I don’t think I have any money with me.”
“Don’t worry,” Andre said. “I’ll pick it up.”
“Would you? I’d hate to have that poor waiter running after me down the street.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“We’ll talk more tomorrow after meditation.” This was not a request.
“We’ll talk more then.”
“Good night, Andre.”
“Night, Morton.”
Filmbuff stalked away, his silver mane trailing behind him as if a wind were blowing through it. Or a solar flare.
Before he left the Westway, he turned, as Andre knew he would, and spoke one last question across the space of the diner.
“You knew Thaddeus Kaye, didn’t you, Father Andre?”
“I knew a man named Ben Kaye. A long time ago,” Andre said, but this was only confirmation of what Filmbuff’s spread-out mind had already told him.
The door slid shut and the Cardinal walked into the night. Andre sipped at his tea.
Eventually the waiter returned. “We close pretty soon,” he said.
“Why do you close so early?” Andre asked.
“It is very late.”
“I remember when this place did not close.”
“I don’t think so. It always closed.”
“Not when I was a student at the seminary.”
“It closed then,” said the waiter. He took a rag from his apron, activated it with a twist, and began to wipe a nearby table.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
“They tell me there’s never been a time when this place didn’t close.”
“Who tells you?”
“People.”
“And you believe them.”
“Why should I believe you? You’re people.” The waiter looked up at Andre, puzzled. “That was a joke,” he said. “I guess it does not translate.”
“Bring me some more tea and then I will go.”
The waiter nodded, then went to get it.
There was music somewhere. Gentle oboe strains. Oh, yes. His pellicle was still playing the hymn.
What do you think?
I think we are going on a quest.
I suppose so.
Do you know where Thaddeus Kaye is?
No, but I have a pretty good idea how to find Ben. And wherever Ben is, Thaddeus Kaye has to be.
Why not tell somebody else how to find him?
Because no one else will do what I do when I find him.
What’s that?
Nothing.
Oh.
When the backup is done, we’ll be on our way.
The third part of Andre’s multiple personality, the convert, was off-line at the moment getting himself archived and debugged. That was mainly what the retreat was for, since using the Greentree data facilities was free to priests. Doing it on Triton would have cost as much as putting a new roof on his house.
Why don’t they send someone who is stronger in faith than we are?
I don’t know. Send an apostate to net an apostate, I guess.
What god is Thaddeus Kaye apostate from?
Himself.
And for that matter, what about us?
Same thing. Here comes the tea. Will you play that song again?
It was Mother’s favorite.
Do you think it could be that simple? That I became a priest because of that hymn?
Are you asking me?
Just play the music and let me drink my tea. I think the waiter wants us out of here.
“Do you mind if I mop up around you?” the waiter said.
“I’ll be done soon.”
“Take your time, as long as you don’t mind me working.”
“I don’t mind.”
Andre listened to mournful oboe and watched as the waiter sloshed water across the infinite universe, then took a mop to it with a vengeance.
Jill
Down in the dark there’s a doe rat I’m after to kill. She’s got thirteen babies and I’m going to bite them, bite them, bite them. I will bite them.
The mulch here smells of dank stupid rats all running running, and there’s nowhere farther to run because this is it, this is the Carbuncle, and now I’m here and this is truly the end of all of it, but a rat can’t stand to know that and won’t accept me until they have to believe me. Now they will believe me.
My whiskers against something soft. Old food? No, it’s a dead buck; I scent his Y code, and the body is dead but the code keeps thumping and thumping. This mulch won’t let it drain out and it doesn’t ever want to die. The Carbuncle’s the end of the line, but this code doesn’t know it or knows it and won’t have it. I give it a poke and a bit of rot sticks to my nose and the grist tries to swarm me, but no I don’t think so.
I sniff out and send along my grist, jill ferret grist, and no rat code stands a chance ever, ever. The zombie rat goes rigid when its tough, stringy code—who knows how old, how far traveled to finally die here at the End of Everywhere—that code scatters to nonsense in the pit of the ball of nothing my grist wraps it in. Then the grist flocks back to me and the zombie rat thumps no more. No more.
Sometimes having to kill everything is a bit of a distraction. I want that doe and her littles really bad and I need to move on.
Down a hole and into a warren larder. Here there’s pieces of meat and the stink of maggot sluice pooled in the bends between muscles and organs. But the rats have got the meat from Farmer Jan’s Mulmyard, and it’s not quite dead yet, got maggot resistant code, like the buck rat, but not smart enough to know it’s dead, just mean code jaw-latched to a leg or a haunch and won’t dissipate. Mean and won’t die. But I am meaner still.
Oh, I smell her!
I’m coming, mama rat. Where are you going? There’s no going anywhere anymore.
Bomi slinks into the larder and we touch noses. I smell blood on her. She’s got a kill, a bachelor male, by the blood spore on her.
It’s so warm and wet, Jill. Bomi’s trembling and wound up tight. She’s not the smartest ferret. I love it, love it, and I’m going back to lie in it.
That’s bad. Bad habit.
I don’t care. I killed it; it’s mine.
You do what you want, but it’s your man Bob’s rat.
No it’s mine.
He feeds you, Bomi.
I don’t care.
Go lay up then.
I will.
Without a by-your-leave, Bomi’s gone back to her kill to lay up. I never do that. TB wouldn’t like it, and besides, the killing’s the thing, not the owning. Who wants an old dead rat to lie in when there’s more to bite?
Bomi told me where she’d be because she’s covering for herself when she doesn’t show and Bob starts asking. Bomi’s a stupid ferret and I’m glad she doesn’t belong to TB.
But me—down another hole, deeper, deeper still. It’s half-filled in here. The doe rat thought she was hiding it, but she left the smell of her as sure as a serial number on a bone. I will bite you, mama.
Then there’s the dead-end chamber I knew would be. Doe rat’s last hope in all the world. Won’t do her any good. But oh, she’s big! She’s tremendous. Maybe the biggest ever for me.
I am very, very happy.
Doe rat with the babies crowded behind her. Thirteen of them, I count by the squeaks. Sweet naked squeaks. Less than two weeks old, they are. Puss and meat. But I want mama now.
The doe sniffs me and screams like a bone breaking and she rears big as me. Bigger.
I will bite you.
Come and try, little jill.
I will kill you.
I ate a sack of money in the City Bank and they chased me and cut me to pieces and just left my tail and—I grew another rat! What will you do to me, jill, that can be so bad? You’d better be afraid of me.
When I kill your babies, I will do it with one bite for each. I won’t hurt them for long.
You won’t kill my babies.
At her.
At her because there isn’t anything more to say, no more messages to pass back and forth through our grist and scents.
I go for a nipple and she’s fast out of the way, but not fast enough and I have a nub of her flesh in my mouth. Blood let. I chew on her nipple tip. Blood and mama’s milk.
She comes down on me and bites my back, her long incisors cut through my fur, my skin, like hook needles, and come out at another spot. She’s heavy. She gnaws at me and I can feel her teeth scraping against my backbone. I shake to get her off, and I do, but her teeth rip a gouge out of me.
Cut pretty bad, but she’s off. I back up thinking that she’s going to try to swarm a copy, and I stretch out the grist and there it is, just like I thought, and I intercept it and I kill the thing before it can get to the mulm and reproduce and grow another rat. One rat this big is enough, enough for always.
The doe senses that I’ve killed her outrider, and now she’s more desperate.
This is all there is for you. This is oblivion and ruin and time to stop the scurry.
This is where you’ll die.
She strikes at me again, but I dodge and—before she can round on me—I snatch a baby rat. It’s dead before it can squeal. I spit out its mangle of bones and meat.
But mama’s not a dumb rat, no, not dumb at all, and does not fly into a rage over this. But I know she regards me with all the hate a rat can hate, though. If there were any light, I’d see her eyes glowing rancid yellow.
Come on, mama, before I get another baby.
She goes for a foot and again I dodge, but she catches me in the chest. She raises up, up.
The packed dirt of the ceiling, wham, wham, and her incisors are hooked around my breastbone, damn her, and it holds me to her mouth as fast as a barbed arrowpoint.
Shake and tear, and I’ve never known such pain, such delicious . . .
I rake at her eyes with a front claw, dig into her belly with my feet. Dig, dig, and I can feel the skin parting, and the fatty underneath parting, and my feet dig deep, deep.
Shakes me again, and I can only smell my own blood and her spit and then sharp, small pains at my back.
The baby rats. The baby rats are latching onto me, trying to help their mother.
Nothing I can do. Nothing I can do but dig with my rear paws. Dig, dig. I am swimming in her guts. I can feel the give. I can feel the tear. Oh, yes!
Then my breastbone snaps and I fly loose of the doe’s teeth. I land in the babies, and I’m stunned and they crawl over me and nip at my eyes and one of them shreds an ear, but the pain brings me to and I snap the one that bit my ear in half. I go for another. Across the warren cavern, the big doe shuffles. I pull myself up, try to stand on all fours. Can’t.
Baby nips my hind leg. I turn and kill it. Turn back. My front legs collapse. I cannot stand to face the doe, and I hear her coming.
Will I die here?
Oh, this is how I want it! Took the biggest rat in the history of the Met to kill me. Ate a whole bag of money, she did.
She’s coming for me. I can hear her coming for me. She’s so big. I can smell how big she is.
I gather my hind legs beneath me, find a purchase.
This is how I die. I will bite you.
But there’s no answer from her, only the doe’s harsh breathing. The dirt smells of our blood. Dead baby rats all around me.
I am very, very happy.
With a scream, the doe charges me. I wait a moment. Wait.
I pounce, shoot low like an arrow.
I’m through, between her legs. I’m under her. I rise up. I rise up into her shredded belly. I bite! I bite! I bite!
Her whole weight keeps her down on me. I chew. I claw. I smell her heart. I smell the new blood of her heart! I can hear it! I can smell it! I chew and claw my way to it.
I bite.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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