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The Flight from Anthien
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The Un-Cypress continued to recite lines from the Hisuian Coda in imitation of Arceus. A wave of nausea, like an unmistakable malaise, had come over the room. Were not the teachings of the ancients correct in supposing that this man now was Abolished, a shell for the Dark Lord to indwell? To be helpless, unable to try strength against the Enemy: was that surely not among the most monstrous torments they were being subjected to?
The Enemy was using ancient methods. It seemed to Bronze that, but for a miracle, their psychic resistance to this horrible thing would wear away in the end. Why did no miracle come? Or rather, why no miracle on the right side? For the presence of the Enemy was in itself a kind of Miracle. Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none? Not for the first time he found himself questioning Divine Justice. He could not understand why Arceus should remain absent when the Enemy was there in person.
"It is done," said the Un-Cypress. "The end comes in a month at the Temple. It comes to my mind, Emrett, that we ought to destroy the city."
"How may I do that, my lord?" It came to Bronze that Emrett was not speaking to Cypress but the Djinn himself.
"We shall destroy the underbelly with bombs," said the Un-Cypress. "It will fall. Leave the rest to die here. Keep all prisoners."
"Could we not make the New Creation now?" said Emrett.
"I am already weary," said the Un-Cypress. "We must wait till I have gathered my strength. But the city will be destroyed."
"That was not a part of the plan we agreed on," said Emrett.
"I am the Bright Evening Star and my word is law," said the Un-Cypress.
"Emrett!" cried Yellow. "You know he's ruining your plans! It will all go down the drain if you expose yourselves. Can't you do something to work against his orders?"
"Work against the orders of the Great Djinn?" said Emrett. He did not respond to her again.
"Now, Bronze," said the Un-Cypress, (now it had taken on a semblance of Cypress's old voice) "here you've hit the end. You have seen a faint impression of our coming world. But you don't really understand how we will make it come about. None of you do." It clasped its hands behind its back and began to circle the room as it lectured.
"You may wonder how we will be motivated to maintain our coming world," it said. "For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within our own minds, of the old "natural" impulses, the reflection of Arceus in all human creatures. Thus at first the Controllers under us may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a 'duty' to do it 'good'. But it is only by confusion that we can remain in this state. We recognize the concept of duty as the result of certain processes which we will then control. Our victory will consist precisely in emerging from the state in which we were acted upon by those processes to the state in which we use them as tools. One of the things we now have to decide is whether we will, or will not, so condition the rest of the subservient human race so that we can go on having the old idea of duty and the old reactions to it. How can duty help us to decide that? Duty itself is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And 'good' fares no better. We know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if any, we should produce. No conception of good can help us to decide. It is absurd to fix one of the things we are comparing and make it the standard of comparison.
"To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for myself and my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, 'Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them, or all of them, to be bad men. They are, (as Emrett is) rather, not men at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what 'Humanity' shall henceforth mean. `Good' and `bad', applied to us, are words without content: for it is from us that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived."
Emrett said: "Bronze, do you remember that I said that all humans want the same things, like food, sex, and scientific progress?"
"You knew I was there?"
"Yes. That is beside the point. What I want you to understand is that I was lying. It will not answer the problem. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that humankind, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty? But that is only the old Human Nature, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If we accept it, then we are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and our final conquest over Nature and Arceus has not really happened. The preservation of the species? But why should the species be preserved? One of the questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity (we know well how it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at once mitigated. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men. Our final conquest will be the abolition of man."
Yet the Conditioners will act," said the Un-Cypress, and for the moment Bronze knew, he KNEW, that it was the Djinn himself speaking and not any leftover relic of Cypress's consciousness. "Hear me well: they will ACT. When I said just now that all motives fail them, I should have said all motives except one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them. Everything except the state of pleasure being a veritable confusion has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honor, or care for posterity.
"When all that says 'It is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains. It cannot be exploded or 'seen through' because it never had any pretensions. The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.
"You Pokedex Holders may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all `rational' or `spiritual' motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Arcean Nature teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favorably with the futility of their own.
"We will envy our slaves as eunuchs envy men. But I do not insist on this, for it is a mere conjecture. What is not conjecture is that our hope even of a 'conditioned' happiness rests on what is ordinarily called 'chance'; the chance that benevolent impulses may on the whole predominate in our Conditioners. For without the judgment 'Benevolence is good', they have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position, they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by "seeing through' all "rational' motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behavior. If you will not obey Natural Law, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere `nature') is the only course left open."
"Then you're wrong," said Bronze. "When all of humankind is subjected to your perfectly 'rational' leadership, then you will find nothing but what proceeds from natural impulses in your minds. Nature, untrammeled by values, will rule you, and through you, all humanity!"
"Correct," said the Un-Cypress. "Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All of Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us forever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Natural Law a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. The defeated shall conquer its victor, and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt."
"But how does this benefit you?" said Bronze. He pointed to the body of Cypress. "You," he said, "tell us all. What good should come to you if Nature becomes your master? Do you rejoice that you are working toward the void? Tell us of your joys, and of what profit you expect to have when you will make yourself acquainted with impulse only."
In the moment that followed this speech two things happened that were utterly unlike terrestrial experience. The body that had been Cypress's threw up its head and opened its mouth and gave a long melancholy howl like a dog; and a single dribble of black liquid trailed down the Un-Cypress's chin and burned the flesh there. Bronze perceived the Djinn's thoughts. He would be the master of Nature, and they would be his slaves.
…
The Un-Cypress began speaking quietly to Emrett. But while Bronze was thinking that a miracle should be expected, as suddenly and sharply as if the solid spiritual darkness about him had spoken with articulate voice, he knew that Arceus was not absent. That sense, so very welcome yet never welcomed without the overcoming of a certain resistance, that sense of the Presence which he had once or twice before experienced on Earth, returned to him. The darkness was packed quite full. It seemed to press upon his trunk so that he could hardly use his lungs: it seemed to close in on his skull like a crown of intolerable weight so that for a space he could hardly think. Moreover, he became aware in some indefinable fashion that it had never been absent, that only some unconscious activity of his own had succeeded in ignoring it.
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind that continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places. Thus, while one part of Bronze remained, as it were, prostrated in a hush of fear and love that resembled a kind of death, something else inside him, wholly unaffected by reverence, continued to pour queries and objections into his brain. "It's all very well," said this voluble critic, "a presence of that sort! But the Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Arceus's representative to stand up to him?"
The answer which came back to him, quick as a fencer's or a tennis player's strike, out of the silence and the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed Blasphemous. "Anyway, what can I do?" babbled the voluble self. "I've done all I can. I've talked till I'm sick of it. He answered everything. It's no good, I tell you." He tried to persuade himself that he, Bronze, could not possibly be Arceus's representative as the Un-Cypress was the representative of Hell. The suggestion was, he argued, itself diabolical: a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania. He was horrified when the darkness simply flung back this argument in his face, almost impatiently. And then (he wondered how it had escaped him till now) he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Anthien though all the dangers he had faced, with divine assistance from several gods, was a wonder in itself. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle.
"Oh, but this is nonsense," said the voluble self. He, Bronze, with his tired body and his ten times defeated arguments: Arceus's spokesman? His mind darted hopefully down a side alley that seemed to promise escape. Very well then. He had been brought here miraculously. He was in Arceus's hands. As long as he did his best, and he had done his best, Arceus would see to the final issue. He had not succeeded. But he had done his best. No one could do more. "Tis not in mortals to command success." He must not be worried about the final result. Arceus would see to that. And Arceus would bring him safely away after his very real, though unsuccessful, efforts. Probably Arceus's real intention was that he should publish to the human race the truths he had learned by seeing the face of Absolute Evil. As for the fate of the War, that could not really rest upon his shoulders. It was in Arceus's hands. One must be content to leave it there. One must have Faith…
It snapped like a violin string. Not one rag of all this evasion was left. Relentlessly, unmistakably, the Darkness pressed down upon him the knowledge that this picture of the situation was utterly false. His journey was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Arceus's hands, Bronze and the Pokedex Holders were those hands. The fate of the world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. They could, if they chose, decline to save the world, or really make an effort of it, and if they declined the world's salvation would not itself be saved. It rested with no other creature in all time or all space. This he saw clearly, though as yet he had no inkling of what he could do.
The voluble self protested, wildly, swiftly, like the propeller of a ship racing when it is out of the water. The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Arceus want to lose? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a boy of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away in another time, as he now could not help remembering, men like Drake were at war against the Terramists, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Adunakor stood under the gate, and Kamado settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Embla herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the centre of the whole universe. The gods of all worlds, the sinless organisms of everlasting light, were silent in Deep Heaven to see what Bronze Tercano of Logaria would do.
Then came blessed relief. He suddenly realized that he did not know what he could do. He almost laughed with joy. All this horror had been premature. No definite task to his ability, bound with shackles as he seemed to be, was before him. All that was being demanded of him was a general and preliminary resolution to oppose the Enemy in any mode which circumstances might show to be desirable, (and he flew back to the comforting words as a child flies back to its mother's arms) "to do his best", or rather, to go on doing his best, for he had really been doing it all along. "What monsters we make of things unnecessarily!" he murmured, settling himself in a slightly more comfortable position. A mild flood of what appeared to him to be cheerful and rational piety rose and engulfed him.
Hullo! What was this? He heard a metal clink! He sat straight upright again, his heart beating wildly against his side. His thoughts had stumbled on an idea from which they started back as a man starts back when he has touched a hot poker. But this time the idea was really too childish to entertain. This time it must be a deception, risen from his own mind. Yet he wiggled his hands nonetheless.
The chains fell off. He stood with his hands on the table, looking at the cuffs below him. All around him was an absence of motion. The Pokedex Holders were not moving, their faces frozen in anger or shock or horror. Emrett's eyes remained permanently glassy as his body bent to hear the Un-Cypress forever. The room was frozen save for Bronze.
And also Tess. He saw her stand and look at him with hope, and then to the Un-Cypress with more disgust. The Un-Cypress had turned its head and stood semi-crouched, its claws clacking against each other, leering at both of them with a mouth curled in a senile smile like an old toothless man, so that the lips covered the teeth.
"Bronze?" said Tess. "What is happening."
"So you mean to try to fight me," said the Un-Cypress, speaking thick.
Bronze felt an involuntarily quaking. He feared bodily strife with the Un-Cypress more than he feared anything else. Vivid pictures crowded upon him…the deadly cold of those hands (he had felt the aura of frost around its body accidentally some minutes before)...the long metallic nails…ripping off narrow strips of flesh, pulling out tendons. One would die slowly. Up to the very end that cruel idiocy would smile into one's face. One would give way long before one died, beg for mercy, promise it help, worship, anything.
The terrible silence and staring went on. But the voice of the Darkness became more and more like a face, a face not without sadness, that looks upon you while you are telling lies, and never interrupts, but gradually you know that it knows, and falter, and contradict yourself, and lapse into silence. The voluble self petered out in the end. Almost the Darkness said to Bronze, "You know you are only wasting time." Every minute it became clearer to him that the parallel he had tried to draw between Cypress and the Devil combined was crude and imperfect. There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring. The question whether the Djinn, or one whom the Djinn has digested, is acting on any given occasion, has in the long run no clear significance. If the remains of Cypress were, at such moments, speaking through the lips of the Un-Cypress, then Cypress was not now a man at all. The forces that had begun, perhaps decades ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left, an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odor of decay. "And this," thought Bronze, "might be my destination; or Tess's."
What had happened on Earth, when Arceus was made a thing of Flesh in Hisui, had altered the universe forever. This would not be a repeated story. Arceus never repeated Himself. The same wave never came twice. When Eve fell, God was not Organic. He had not yet made men members of His body: since then He had, and through them henceforward He would save and suffer. One of the purposes for which He had done all this was to save Earth not through Himself but through Himself in Bronze. If Bronze refused, the plan, so far, miscarried. For that point in the story, a story far more complicated than he had conceived, it was he who had been selected. With a strange sense of "fallings from him, vanishings," he perceived that you might just as well call himself the center of all happenings. You might look upon this story as the mere side theater of the grand story told in the Legends of Arceus, or as a mere preparation for the stories that were to come after. The one was neither more nor less true than the other. Nothing was more or less important than anything else, nothing was a copy or model of anything else.
He fell back on a different line of defense. How could he fight this immortal enemy? Even if he were a fighting boy, instead of a scholar with damaged eyes and a bad wound in his back, what use was there in fighting it? It couldn't be killed, could it? But the answer was almost immediately plain. Cypress's body could be destroyed; and presumably, that body was the Enemy's only foothold in Earth. By that body, when that body still obeyed a human will, it had allowed the Djinn to enter it: expelled from it, it would doubtless have no other habitation. It had entered that body at Cypress's own invitation, and without such invitation could enter no other.
Bronze remembered that the unclean spirits, in the Hisuian Coda, had a horror of being cast out into the "deep." And thinking of these things he perceived at last, with a sinking of heart, that if physical action were indeed demanded of him, it was an action, by ordinary standards, neither impossible nor hopeless. On the physical plane it was one Logarian boy against another middle-aged body, and both unarmed save for fists and teeth and nails. At the thought of these details, terror and disgust overcame him. To kill the thing with such weapons would be a nightmare; to be killed (who knew how slowly?) was more than he could face. That he would be killed he felt certain. "When," he thought, "did I ever win a direct fight in all my life?"
"It is not for nothing that you are named Bronze," said the Voice.
The thing seemed impossible. "God, why me?" he asked.
"My name is Elyon," said the Voice. "It is also not for nothing that I am named that."
Resolved to battle, Bronze felt pretty certain that he would never again wield an un-maimed body until a greater morning came for the whole universe, and he was glad that the instrument had been thus tuned up to concert pitch before he had to surrender it. "When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied," he said to himself.
He squared up to his enemy and even took Emrett's knife from where it rested in the seat. But the fight never manifested. Its face the color of liver, the Un-Cypress collapsed. It was not breathing, yet, as Bronze had noticed, it had never breathed even when making the semblance of life apparent.
"I have cast your Enemy into sleep," said the Voice. "He will not wake till you are done. Do not destroy him now. Get up. Walk twenty paces from the entrance down the hall and find what you need. Your sister will come with you also."
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Bronze passed with no intermediate stages from a sleeplike stupor to a full consciousness of his task. When he moved over the sleeping body of the Un-Cypress he saw that Tess was following him with no hesitation. He sensed that it was Arceus's doing that she would also know what to do. He shot a look at the frozen form of Emrett, fancied that the eyes were following him, and opened the door that led outside the banquet hall.
The hall was flanked by petrified Eclipse guards, some with smiles plastered on their pale faces. It seemed that the Lord God had cast that whole complex or perhaps that whole city into deep sleep. For a moment this gave him a sense of desolation, but almost at once he rejoiced that no memory of blood and rage should be left imprinted in these other Pokedex Holders. They took the twenty paces and found a door to their left.
Inside was a grey little room with his bag lying on a wheeled table shaped like a hospital gurney. Several guards stood around it, able to move by their own power no more than the statue of Haurgon in Anthien Square. He found his Poke Balls and dagger, and, blessedly, his Bronze Brick. A small yell of triumph escaped Tess when she found her own Gabite.
He thought of Jake, who was either alive in the city or captured. "I might never see him again," he thought; and then he looked at Tess, and thought: "I shall never again look on a female body in quite the same way as I look on hers." As he stood looking at her, what was most with him was an intense and orphaned longing that he might, if only for once, have seen the great Mother and Father, Tor and Embla, Adam and Eve, of the human race, in her innocence and splendor.
"Other things, other blessings, other glories," he murmured. "But never that. Never in all worlds, that. God can make good use of all that happens. But the loss is real."
"What was that?"
Before he could answer Tess, the voice returned. "The great princes that protect your people, Dialga and Palkia, will come to aid you. Cover your eyes."
…
They did so and felt a great blast of heat that hit them like a furnace blaze, or even its opposite, a sodden breath of humid summer's air. Bronze was now almost too weak to move. Something in the air, and the wide silence which made a background to the subtle creaking of the city under the thrumming of the frigate engines, told him that he was in the presence of two celestial beings. The two of them crawled rather than walked out of the room into the hallway, which was bathed in sweet diamond light.
Looking back whence he had come he saw a being standing at the door, a being that seemed to be made of ice. Under it the light was spectral blue, but near where he lay it mingled with another light and was warm amber. There was mist and freshness and dew all about him. At his side rose a shape covered with streamers of bright pearl, but gleaming like coral glass where its own skin showed through.
Now high in air above him, now welling up as if from glens and valleys far away, a song floated through his head and was like the first hint of Eternity. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird's voice. As a bird's voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full-bellied, rich and golden-brown: passionate too, but not with the passions of men. He knew that he was lying before the physical forms of Dialga and Palkia.
I cannot describe their faces. They burnt so bright I thought my skin would be scorched to cinders. But oh God, how tenderly, how tenderly that fire purged me.
Tess reeled back dizzy and blinded, more shocked by them than she could ever have been by the prospect of bombs. Perhaps she thought the awe and strangeness would dash her joy. But that is the thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. She had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when she saw them she knew that she had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in her life when she had supposed herself alone, so that now she could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "So it was you all the time".
All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The memory of ambient kinship that she dimly felt from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered. Recognition made her free of all fear.
There was another element to their looks. They had faces that were not human, not human in any shred of the word, a million miles away. But they had the Face that no man can say he does not know. And so she not only saw Them, she saw Him. What was blinding, suffocating fire to her mind at another time was now cool light, was clarity itself, and wore the form of a Man.
...
No words were spoken. The gods took the two by the hand and then the scene changed. They were standing on a metal catwalk amid a shaft filled with heat that pained them. At first Bronze was blinded by the light. When at last he could take in his surroundings he that the bottom of the shaft was so filled with firelight that it gave him the impression of being hollowed out of red clay. He was looking down the length of it. Beyond the catwalk guardrails appeared to be an abyss of blinding brightness. The roof was so high as to be invisible, but the walls soared up into the darkness with metal curves like daggers.
He staggered to his feet, walked across the platform (which was hot to the touch) and found himself with Tess at the other end of it. He was in the reactor shaft of Anthien City. The fire appeared to be thousands of feet below him and he could not see the other sides of the pit in which it swelled and roared and writhed. His eyes could only bear it for a second or so, and when he turned away the rest of the reactor tunnel seemed dark. He drew away from the edge and sat down with his back to the fire to collect his thoughts.
They were collected in an unlooked-for way. Suddenly and irresistibly, like an attack by tanks, that whole view of the universe that Cypress (if it were Cypress) had so lately preached to him, took all but complete possession of his mind. He seemed to see that he had been living all his life in a world of illusion. The ghosts, the damned ghosts, were right. The beauty of Earth, the innocence of the First Man and Women, the sufferings of saints, and the kindly affections of men, were all only an appearance and outward show. What he had called the worlds were but the skins of the worlds: a quarter of a mile beneath the surface, and from thence through thousands of miles of dark and silence and infernal fire, to the very heart of each. Reality lived, the meaningless, the unmade, the omnipotent idiocy to which all spirits were irrelevant and before which all efforts were vain. Whatever was to kill him would come from the hideous duct, be excreted in front of him, and then he would die.
In the end it was his rage that broke the illusion. Tess had gotten into a shouting match with someone else in the tunnel, a man in Eclipse livery holding a bag of nitrate bombs. Bronze sent out Magneton. A sudden electric field took the man holding the explosives by the ankles and cast him screaming over the edge of the bridge. He saw the technician's shape black, for a moment, against the sea of fire; and that was the end of it.
...
Dumbly the two stumbled out of the reactor room and up into the lightened city, the gods guiding their every step. Instead of seeing the web of nightmare frigates above they got quite a different vision. The Eclipse fleet was being put to flight. Orbs of lighting and blasts from smaller vessels that had come from beyond the limits of the city rocked the enemy ships as men and guns were being hastily loaded up. Over the sea battle was raging, the Association's red and white ships against the Alliance's orange and black.
"He was lying," Tess laughed. "They came!"
"I think he didn't know," Bronze said. "Shall we fight?"
"No. We'd better leave through the sewers again." It amazed her that he was being so dense. She had long ceased to feel any resentment at Bronze's tendency, as it were, to dispose of her. But Arceus. Up till now she had not thought of Arceus much either. She did not doubt now that the angels existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed, whom Bronze, and through him Jake. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as "religion," she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of her old plump neighbor saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds.
On the one hand, the terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound and the faces of gods standing beside them, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Savior (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive Pokemon), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. Because, really, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Arceus might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that had fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blazer with just enough left outside the blaze to utter some kind of protest.
"But…but this is unbearable. I ought to have been told." It did not, at that moment, occur to her even to doubt that if such things existed they would be totally and unchangeably adverse to her.
...
It was Sapphire who first noticed the change, perhaps because her mind was more like a bear than a human's. Goodness or pain occurred and she tasted it. And that was not all. Like a Pokemon, many of her loves, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of a wild woman's sensations. She was no more like a human egoist than she was like a human altruist. There was little prose in her life. The appetencies which a modern mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for her quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed her whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colors of Paradise.
She was one of our race that has been subjected to certain childhood conditions, that it served to plunge her back at moments into the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness. She would have emerged believing that she had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, like the Pokemon, part of Sappires primal mind lived its life.
Sapphire knew that the gods were at work. A flash of remembered agony burned across her arm and Ruby's. Then the images of the world around her were gone as she stood upright, manacles gone, lips a little trembling. The images were gone, but Ruby was there, was with her, was part of her. She had moved beyond knowing him in sensory images to that place that is beyond images. Now she was suddenly inside Ruby, not dark hair, or scars, or eager red eyes, or the glowing, effusively glowing smile; nor was she hearing the deep voice with the occasional treble cracking; not any of this, but only Ruby. She was with Ruby, melding with every atom of her being, returning to him all the fortitude and endurance and hope that he had given her many times.
The others were looking at the two great Pokedex Holders of Hoenn as they stood looking at each other, the Un-Cypress, Emrett. Emerald was testing his restraints, found that they were unlocked, and remained sitting in a pool of sweat from his anger and terror. It was Gold who was speaking, Gold the great comforter.
"You're a mask," said Gold to the Un-Cypress. "Just a false face. The only reason that thing in the bottle needs to use you is that you aren't as dead as the others. But when it's done with you, you won't be anything at all. You don't scare me or any of us."
"I will scare you," said the Un-Cypress. It stabbed the wooden table with its fingernails, taking hardly any effort to push up to the tips of its fingers. It made a horrible noise from its throat, like a frog or a baby bird having its bowels torn out. The whole clamor was like an infant being stuck with tacts while several tigers clawed at a chalkboard.
"You're not making us afraid," Sapphire told it. "And if there's a little bit of that Professor Cypress left inside you, he knows his dreams were a lie. Everything about you is a lie and a cheat. Like the loaded dice my daddy got for his birthday, like the presents they put in the store windows with nothing in them, no presents, they're just empty boxes. Just for show, my daddy says. You're it, not a person. You're the bottle. And when you get what you want, you won't give Cypress anything, but you're selfish. And Cypress knows it. That's why we'll never be afraid of you, you lying, false face."
"Liar! Liar!" The words came out in a thin shriek and its eyes had lunatic intensity in them. Its hands wavered wildly on the table, and Emrett noticed that Bronze and Tess were gone. The sound of explosions, like a host of dragons breaking stone from above, had already pierced the room.
The face in the Un-Cypress changed. It was hard to say how; there was no melting or merging of the features. The body trembled slightly, and then the bloody hands opened like broken claws. That was all. But Cypress was there, looking at Sapphire in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that her heart flamed within her chest. Its mouth drew down in a quivering bow.
"Get away from here," said Jonathan Rowell Cypress for the last time. "And tell Bronze how much I loved him."
"No," said Emrett with a snarl. He took one of Cypress's bloodied hands, and kissed it lovingly. "My lord, do not forsake me. It is almost over."
Like a deeper nightmare, Emrett pressed a trigger that had been hidden in his robes. "Explosives!" cried Platinum, but there was no such effect. The explosives were now a scattered collection of molecules burning in the nuclear fires of the city's energy core.
An expression of grotesque terror and dawning realization swept across the broken features of Emrett. The trigger dropped from his fisted hands and bounced harmlessly on the carpet. "The bombs!" screamed Emrett. "Oh no! That can't be allowed! Certainly not! No! You goddamned little pups! Certainly not! Oh, oh, oh!"
"It is!" said Diamond fiercely. He had stood up, free by Dialga and Palkia's mild spells, and shook his face at the two ruined things at the end of the table. "Any minute now! I know it! They'll come! And you know it too!"
"No, oh no, it mustn't, it can't, you dirty little boy, I'll make you take your medicine, I'll make you take every drop, oh no, oh no!"
So blackened his mind had become that neither he or any of his guards tethered to his life-force that he could not sense the empyrean presence of Palkia freeing the Pokemon of the captives. In a room bordering the hall, Dialga laid his hand on the head of a liberated Aggron and whispered in its ear and its dark mind was filled with excitement as though some long forbidden and forgotten pleasure were suddenly held out to it. Down the long, empty passages of Anthien it plooded behind the god. Saliva dripped from its mouth and it was beginning to growl. It was thinking of warm, salt tastes, of the pleasant resistances of bone, of things to crunch and lick and worry. And a host of Pokemon followed it.
At last the door gave. Both wings gave. The Un-Cypress and Emrett dashed away from the shards of wood that flew through the air like broken piano keys. The passage, framed in the doorway, was dark. Out of the darkness there came a grey something. It swayed in the air; then began methodically to break off the splintered wood on each side and make the doorway clear. Then Sapphire saw distinctly how its hand burst through and seized a man, the Admin Kett, she thought, (but everyone looked different now) and lifted him bodily high off the floor. After that, monstrous, improbable, the huge shape of the Aggron thrust its way into the room its eyes enigmatic, its horns standing stiffly out like the devil's horns on the slopes of its head. It stood for a second with Kett writhing in the iron glove of its arm and then dashed him to the floor. It trampled him. After it raised head and and roared horribly; then plunged straight forward into the room, trumpeting and trampling, continuously trampling like a girl treading grapes, heavily and soon wetly tramping in a pash of blood and bones, of flesh, meat, and shredded tablecloth.
Something more than danger darted from the sight into Sapphire's brain. The pride and insolent glory of the beast, the carelessness of its killings, seemed to crush her spirit even as its flat feet were crushing the Eclipse guards. "Rono!" she thought. "You've turned out to be one grand beast." Here surely came the King of the world...then everything went black and she knew no more.
Above the chaos of sounds which now awoke, for there seemed to be a new Pokemon in the room every minute, there came at last one sound in which those Eclipse guards still capable of understanding could take comfort. Thud-thud-thud; the door was being battered from the outside. It was a huge folding door, a door by which a small car could almost enter, for the room was made in imitation of the palace of Atun-Kaah. Already one or two of the panels were splintering. The noise maddened those who had made that door their goal. It seemed also to madden the Pokedex Holder's roaming, terribly savage Pokemon. They did not stop to further maul what they killed, or not more than to take one lick of the blood. There were dead and dying bodies everywhere by now, for the scrum was by this time killing as many Eclipse men as the beasts. And always from all sides went up the voices trying to shout to those beyond the door. "Quick. Quick. Hurry," but shouting only fearful nonsense. Louder and louder grew the noise at the door. As if in imitation, Gold's Typhlosion leaped on the table where the Un-Cypress had sat and began drumming on its chest. Then, with a roar, it jumped down onto the retreating Admin Harry and burned his arm. He screamed, clutched his maimed limb, and fled the open doors.
...
Neither Emrett nor the Un-Cypress had been killed when the two gods had slain the Eclipse guards and freed the Pokedex Holders. They naturally knew all the possible ways out of the room, and even before the coming of Dialga and Palkia after the explosives had been disposed of, Emrett had slipped away with his master. He understood what was happening, if not perfectly, yet better than anyone else. He knew that powers more than human had come down to destroy the Eclipse Alliance. And this again told him something worse. It meant that his own dark Masters had been completely out in their calculations. They had talked of a barrier that made it impossible which powers from Deep Heaven should reach the surface of the Earth; had assured him that nothing from outside could pass their protective orbit. All their polity was based on the belief that Tellus was blockaded, beyond the reach of such assistance and left (as far as that went) to their mercy and his. Therefore he knew that his plans in Anthien were utterly spoiled.
It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed out to the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of a good play where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a gnat, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way.
Harry and Eric were also still alive. They met in one of the cold, lighted passages, so far away from the dining room that the noise of the carnage of the god's sword and spear was but a faint murmur. The Eclipse mercenaries were screaming, screaming, while the Pokedex Holders were fainted or fled. They were screaming louder than the screaming caused by thumbscrews or fire; only the special king of searing holiness afforded to Arceus's enemies melted their skin and broke their minds as it did.
Harry was hurt, his right arm badly mauled. They did not speak but walked on side by side. They got into the capital frigate and set out to regroup at Base Prime.
"Do you think we should have let the boy go?" Emrett said, speaking of Jake. He and the Un-Cypress were sitting so close that their knees almost touched.
"You must not forget," said the Un-Cypress, "that his value does not rest solely on his value to Bronze. I think that he and the Woodhall female are eugenically interesting. And secondly, I think he can offer no resistance. The hours of fear in the cell, and then an appeal to desires that undercut the fear, will have an almost certain effect on a character of his sort. We can do damage with him unlike what we could do with Robert and Lily."
"Of course," said Emrett, "nothing is so much to be desired as the greatest possible unity. You will not suspect me of under-rating that aspect of our orders. Any fresh individual brought into that unity would be a source of the most intense satisfaction to all concerned. I desire the closest possible bond. I would welcome an interpenetration of personalities so close, so irrevocable, that it almost transcends individuality. You need not doubt that I would open my arms to receive to absorb...to assimilate this young man."
They were now sitting so close together that their faces almost touched, as if they had been lovers about to kiss. The Un-Cypress's eyes caught to light so that it made its position invisible: only its mouth, smiling but not relaxed in the smile, revealed its expression. Emrett's mouth was open, the lower lip hanging down, his eyes wet, his whole body hunched and collapsed in his chair as if the strength had gone out of it. A stranger would have thought he had been drinking. Then his shoulders twitched and gradually he began to laugh. And the Un-Cypress did not laugh, but its smile grew moment by moment brighter and also colder, and it stretched out its hand and patted its colleague on the shoulder. Suddenly in that silent frigate room there was a crash. A lamp had fallen off the table, swept onto the floor as, with sudden swift convulsive movement, the two creatures lurched forward towards each other and sat swaying to and fro, locked in an embrace from which each seemed to be struggling to escape. And as they swayed and scrabbled with hand and nail, there arose, shrill and faint at first, but then louder and louder, a cackling noise that seemed in the end rather an animal than a senile parody of laughter.
.
.
.
Everything had changed. The Alliance was gone and so was Jake. Their enemies had put themselves out in the open, their plans imploded, and the gods had descended. Nothing in the war could ever be the same again.
She and Bronze had returned to the skycopter chamber and were flying north. Soon, Tess knew, she would fall asleep. But there were some things to think about. She accepted what Bronze had been saying about Arceus, yet it seemed to her nonsensical. For still she thought that "Religion" was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that Bronze never talked about Religion. He never talked about Arceus. He talked about God.
He had no picture in his mind of some mist steaming upward, rather of strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy. Supposing one were a thing after all, a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self? Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Jake and Bronze, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was? Supposing Arceus on this subject agreed with them and not with her? For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness. Then, at one particular stretch of the long flight, the change came.
What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. But the world was changed. A boundary had been crossed through the whole universe, outside of her and inside her. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact, she perceived at once that Bronze's words had been entirely misread. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them: but from them you could know nothing of it.
There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendor or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the molding hands or in the kneaded lump.
Words take too long. To be aware of all this and to know that it had already gone made one single experience. It was revealed only in its departure. The largest thing that had ever happened to her had, apparently, found room for itself in a moment of time too short to be called time at all. Her hand closed on nothing but a memory. And as it closed, without an instant's pause, the voices of those who have not joy rose howling and chattering from every corner of her being.
"Take care. Draw back. Keep your head. Don't commit yourself," they said. And then more subtly, from another quarter, "You have had a religious experience. This is very interesting. Not everyone does. How much better you will now understand the old poets!" Or from a third direction, more sweetly, "Go on. Try to get it again. It will please Bronze."
But her defenses had been captured and these counter-attacks were unsuccessful.