The infernal, p.2
The Infernal, page 2
He shouted for a canteen, and cast down a rope he’d anchored.
He kicked at the carrion birds, which had not yet begun to fill their stomachs with the flesh of the boy, driven back, perhaps, by the umbilical singularity—which was here narrow as a cello string, and beginning to hum, though it opened up to a vortex hundreds of miles in diameter as it rose up to the mesosphere.
From the top of the Chimney, the scout SEMAPHORED back to the base.
The scout then touched him or her or perhaps it—let us allow for him—let us say him and boy, when the burns, including those between the legs, were of such severity that neither race nor gender was immediately apparent—he touched the little boy, this poor thing, as he later called him, not remembering where he’d touched the poor thing. He knew only that the flesh still burned—and his own hand was on fire in the touching, lit somehow with a clear flame. The scout stumbled backward, and did not understand it—that a living boy could be burning flesh, that he himself was burning and yet was still in motion, that his own heels now hung at the Chimney’s very lip.
He did not understand that he was still moving, still stumbling back, and did not understand, as it was happening, the fall that snapped his spine. Later he would understand—but at that moment, no. He simply could not understand: how it was that the faces of the men and horses (the bones in the horses’ faces smooth, implacable) had flown up to encircle him there, on top of the Chimney. That the faces of men and horses could have flown up around him, that a boy could be a living thing and a burning thing, both at once, and that his own body was now the fact of its new immobility and the fact of a single pain—that he, the scout, was (the scout thought) burning—that his whole body was burning up—that in this burning up he was held immobile (in truth it was only his hand that burned—with a clear flame, where he had touched the boy—the pain and immobility otherwise the pain and immobility of the fall that had snapped his spine)—this was, all of this, an outrage. The scout bared his teeth and howled at the outrage to the bodies—to the boy’s and to his own through the boy’s—howled past or against the ring of human and equine faces, over and beyond the Chimney, a sound that carried even the three kilometers back to the base—the soldiers heard the scout’s howl and heard what he howled—what he howled was the fact of their burning—and as he howled, he knew: that they both must die—both he and the poor thing, must now, this very instant, surely die—and so he howled and set the huge birds reeling across the face of the near-vertical sun.
But in this, he was mistaken.
The scout did not die at Al-Madkhanah, the Chimney.
Nor did the boy.
The scout in fact died that night.
But let us say no more of the scout (his howls scattered the buzzards, and when one became tangled in the Wet-Grid’s shimmer, the grid unthreaded itself to release the creature without harm, reconnecting along a new path …)—he matters only insofar as he impacted the boy, and that impact is at an end.
It is the boy who concerns us in this report. This impossible boy. This boy whose appearance could not be accounted for by grid or soldier. This boy who did not die. Who was brought back to the base, his eyes a pair of shallow, crusted depressions. Who had no fingernails or genitals. Whose ears were stubs; who was missing his right leg below the knee, and left arm at the elbow; the boy who had, in spite of all, a perfect pink tongue with which to speak, and would not use it.
MAKE HIM SPEAK [edit]
We wanted to go to work on it—the tongue of the boy. But we were afraid to make it shy.
So the tongue—we did not even know with what language it might one day address us—was declared off-limits.
Alternatives were proposed.
Make him comfortable. Then make him less comfortable. Alternate comfort and discomfort. Make it clear we want something. Morphine, then withhold morphine. “And how should we make it clear what it is we want?” What does anyone ever want of a prisoner? We want INFORMATION. “Does he know he’s a prisoner?” If he doesn’t, you’d best make it your business to tell him. Comfort, discomfort.
But the prisoner was beyond comfort, we now believe—his consciousness had undergone some change. That must have been the case. One could not live like that—could not suffer the pain of those injuries without undergoing some kind of change.
If we’d had him in a place where modern medical technologies were not snuffed out, there might have been options. The medical authorities we flew in during those first critical twenty-four hours, even stripped of their glorious devices, were in agreement: to move him out of the valley would be his death. And his death would be the death of information.
THE OMNOSYNE [edit]
Some fifty years ago, as the Omnosyne experiments progressed at DR. VANNEVAR’S INSTITUTE FOR YOUTH ADVANCES, the MEMEX became sick—very sick.
The Memex began to burn up from within, to lose connections, to make new ones arbitrarily, cancerously. Terminals went dark, or spewed only noise. Still we fed in the Omnosyne confessions, and they were subdivided, probed, subjected to the most rigorous possible analysis, at least by the standards of the time.
Once we understood it for sabotage, we scrubbed all traces of the Omnosyne’s workings from the Memex. We were sincere in our desire to destroy both the Omnosyne and its creator, Jimmy Wales. Yet: we have always allowed ourselves certain hedges against sincerity. The interrogator himself, you see—the only one capable of operating the apparatus, the only one who understood its gears and keys and almost silken wires, to say nothing of the science of SPINAL TISSUES and the science of HYOID BONE, and the relationship between them—he was not eliminated, as some among us had wished. Rather, he was placed in solitary confinement, in our most secure facility. And for five decades we’ve held him to one side (and he still looks a youth, his skin grown thicker, somehow waxy, but from a distance, if you squint: a youth still, unchanged from his days at the institute), held him for just such a contingency, just such an impossible moment.
THEORY OF THE OMNOSYNE [edit]
In nerve and bone (so goes the theory), truth lives—in each individual, these nerve and bone cells holding his deepest kernel of belief: and this belief is information. The information—this deep story of the self—is replicated endlessly, each copy continually changing, perpetually communicating its information to all the other cells—every cell, all at once, and how is that possible?
THE OMNOSYNE AS DEATH SENTENCE [edit]
Once given over to the Omnosyne, a body with even the faintest flicker of life will remain animate—will begin to confess; the pages are spat from the apparatus, dense with blocks of Omnotic Code; the body does not relinquish its hold on life until the confession is at an end. Then the body dies, as all given over to the Omnosyne die. Yes, the subject is preserved this long and no longer—the procedure is invariably fatal.
IN THE CLOUD [edit]
And now the Cloud roils with new energy, it grows and changes, and we roil and grow with it—we, the world-body of Commissioners, drawn forth, all at once, and as never before, each to his own terminal—we spin and dip through the Cloud, even as, with some piece of our minds, we attend to these reports—writing and editing and reediting and reverting these words almost as sleepwalkers.
COMMISSION RESPONSE TO THE AKKAD BOY [edit]
We need the information.
He is part of what is happening and we need—now, today—the information that is inside him.
Things are happening—some change is at hand, as though the Wet-Grid and the Cloud are entwining, and reaching not down, for the earth, but up—thrusting up to the plane of fixed stars, and beyond; and it seems perhaps that great birds of light are calling back to us—and we want to understand—we want to know what next.
We must know.
Before the boy’s dead!
And so we ask: Shall we, after all these years, make use of the Omnosyne?
And so it is decided: Yes, the Omnosyne, one last time.
Shall we free the traitor Jimmy Wales?
And so it is decided: after these decades of solitary confinement, we shall free the traitor Jimmy Wales and send him to the Akkad Valley to make use once again of the Omnosyne, his great and terrible apparatus of extraction.
The Jewboy picked his way through the boulders near the cave system. He smashed a lizard with a rock, scuttled up to the next boulder, and smashed another lizard. The Jewboy smiled vaguely, head lolling, as he pounded out a third lizard’s guts, my lieutenants tell me.
“The heat! Who smiles in such heat?” they ask.
Through the long afternoon the burning sun blasts our mountain, fiery air jams itself into the farthest recesses of the cave system, or as deep as we’ve yet managed to venture. There may be deeper passages, cooler passages. For this I have no evidence, only suspicions and the occasional chill.
“We thought of killing him,” the first lieutenant says. He hurls the smiling Jew to the floor.
“But we brought him to you instead,” says the second lieutenant.
“Pig!” “Little satanist!”—these the words of the third and fourth lieutenants as they disassemble and wipe down their rifles.
I recline on the floor on an array of pillows. I raise the creature by the hair and gaze into his liquid eyes. No reflection there, just black oil.
“Whenever you look at a Jew, you look at a smiling Jew,” I say. “These Hebrew grins have been known to penetrate and at times becloud the senses, such that he is brought even here, to the central chamber, this pipsqueak Yid who should have been dispatched on sight.”
The first and fourth lieutenant: “But Teacher—”
“Does iron mix with wood?” I ask. “Or blood with bone?”
The second and third lieutenant: “Teacher, we thought—”
“You should have slaughtered our little pig well away from our cave system. But he is here now, so we will slaughter him here.”
I say these words, and ease the boy across my lap.
The notion that we can remake the world-body. Waziristan the guts of the world, not the head or heart, but the guts. Then yank out the guts, the world bowing its head in horror, seeing with its eyes what its head knows: guts spilling from an open torso, pink and purple coils of warm innards spilling out from a world-body falling in slow motion.
I work my fingers into the Yid’s hair. I say, “Even this mistake—a serious, perhaps a grave mistake—can be an opportunity for learning. Every moment, I tell you, is a peg we can pull ourselves up on, lifting ourselves clear of the world of flesh and toil. Take, for instance, the body across my lap: so light one entertains the fantasy that he’s just husks, no blood inside. But the circulatory elements at his throat pound grotesquely, as you see.”
All four lieutenants grunt their satisfaction.
“What does this teach us? What can we learn from this phenomenon? And when I slice open his throat—how much greater will our learning be?”
Knife raised overhead, I roll Jewboy in my lap so he’s fully exposed to the lieutenants. And I bring down the blade.
It is then that I meet with a curious and quite powerful resistance.
A piece of Yid conjuring to stop the arm? The lieutenants cease their grunting, and their eyes go wide—all four pairs, all at once. What is holding my arm is holding it with great determination. But I do not give in to the force that counters me—for I am the stronger.
Beside and behind me the air tips and crashes; and a fine mist of blood fills the air as the blade slips into the neck of the naked Jew.
Forty-eight lamps, arrayed in three semiconcentric ellipses, each on its own stool, throw light and shadow across the floor of the central chamber. While the youths tend to my blood each morning, the boys tend to the lamps, topping up the oil. Youths, boys, each assigned his own task. I don’t think it’s mere fancy to say that for my birds this is the most pleasurable time of day. A dozen cages hang at the perimeter of the chamber, the red-footed falcon, the purple gallinule, corncrakes and bullion crakes, also an Indian nightjar, an eagle, and a quantity of jack snipe, as well as the oldest birds, a pair of ring-necked parrots with their incompetent, bovine faces. When the lamps are refilled, a warmer light spills through the chamber and the birds lift their heads to call to one another, black eyes flashing, as though the darkness had been banished through their own agency. All but the snipe, which flap away from the light, batting demented at the slender sycamore bars, crying for a night they think they’ve lost.
Of course, there’s no night in our cave system, properly speaking.
Heat, chills, such cycles: but no night.
And the smile of the Jew, which flicks on and off in another cycle, not, as yet, understood.
Yes, he is alive—for the time he is, and he will remain so until we have unlocked the Yid mysteries, until we have squeezed from him the juice of knowledge. This could be the key—in our world struggle, this little Jewboy might well offer us a decisive advantage. By the grace of God it has become my mission to replace, or rather augment, my current understandings of the Jew—instinctive, scriptural, and so forth—with something else.
Let us call it a scientific and contemplative understanding.
The lieutenants and boys venture outside, and thus they remain in touch with—trapped by—the illusion of day and night. In fact there’s no such thing, only a rotation of bodies, only a machine to clean the blood and swarms of beetles where once there were none—even a child knows this. But to learn a life without night and day, without the first idea of night (we say without night, and understand that the coin’s flip side—day—is also instantly invoked, instantly banished—this is the first step in understanding)—yes, to internalize such a way of being is a very different question, one that has gripped me for years. And as I study the pig it comes to me that the Zionists have always, in all their dealings with the Crusaders, kept an eye to the not-night, and our little Jewboy, his head now rolling in my direction, this Jew turning away from the wall we’ve chained him to, watches not only, or even primarily, me.
But here perhaps I go too far. It seems unlikely that the Jew at large is privileged to understand it—the cycle of days and years, the rotating and wheeling bodies, all of this not-night. And certainly not this mute and smiling fool. Nevertheless: how to explain the persistent survival of the Jewish nation, the Jewish race, how to explain the Jewboy, alive on the floor of the central chamber, knees clutched to chest, hands rubbing those snake-oil eyes then vanishing again under the blanket?
I sliced into his neck, but not through it—thus did he survive.
What stopped me were the tubes—the tubes that connected me to my blood machine. I was hooked up to my machine when they brought the Jewboy, and in my agitation I had quite forgotten it. The glass sphere shattered against the head of the blood helper boy, then the razor-edged remnants slashed open his neck, as the machine fell against him.
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elevator boy promoted to blood helper boy, lamp boy to elevator boy, and so on, down the line. The system functions automatically: any vacancy opened by death is filled from below with an algorithm not dissimilar to that which orders the ecliptics of the lamps’ circles, the number and type of birds, the schedules of drilling and target practice in the floors below, the distribution of rations. All these systems will function in my absence, mathematically; I am, all praise to He who has ordained it, a sick man, forever blacking out, and day by day the blood in my veins thickens. These blackouts have grown more severe in recent months, and worse still since my machine’s destruction. And yet—I insist on this point—we have never been so strong. That strength, when matched with our new Jew-knowledge, will elevate and purify our struggle still further.
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Is it really possible that the years have so compromised my instincts that at the first Yid I lose all sense of what surrounds me, cave and bird and binding tube? The lieutenants, too, in spite of their daily training, have likewise forgotten themselves, such that even as my machine lay shattered and tangled with innards, the Jew was their only concern: “Teacher, kill him, Teacher, shouldn’t you, Teacher, Teacher, do you need assistance, killing him …”
The tip of my knife was still lodged in the neck. I could easily have pushed in and through. Instead, I closed my eyes, and wondered how I’d forgotten—failed to understand how to react to a simple Jew.
It must be a dream—some dream of Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, which came across the ocean, and even here to our cave system, to infect me.
I had not seen this new dream coming, but yesterday I found myself caught up—I saw the world not as it was, but as my adversaries might have wished me to see it—a world warped and blinkered—and perhaps the filaments even now cling to my face. But we will shake ourselves free, and if God wills it—all praise be to Him—we will awake to a new knowledge.
This is why I will make the Jew an object of study.
I must put the Jewboy through his paces, you see.
To understand the Jew—and through him our great adversaries across the sea, for whom the Jewish race plays dogsbody.
My head downticked in blackout, then upticked, alert. I eased my knife from his neck and worked my thumb into the hole, stoppering the blood. “We will not kill the Yid today,” I said, and I twisted the pig’s head, thumb still in place, so that the lieutenants could observe the blood-sprent smile. “There is too much left to learn. I tell you, there is no longer even a rush. For rightly did the poet speak”:
