At The Cenotaph (Part 2)

Phersefena in Tuprefolle

A long four hours had passed since Amollede lowered himself into the tomb, closing the canopy cover behind him. It was now late afternoon and a cold wind was blowing across the meadow, ruffling the yellow salt grass in long rolling waves. High thin clouds spread across the sky turning the already weak sun into a pale silver disk. A faint rumble of very distant thunder caught his attention. Towering clouds the color of dried mustard covered the western horizon behind the tips of the Seven Ghosts. Even as Phaakron watched, streams of slowly flowing mist began rolling down the northern wall of the caldera. A flash of lightening lit a tower of clouds far off to his right on the northern wall of the caldera. Nine seconds later came the still faint thunder. A slight smell of ozone filed the thin mountain air.

Phaakron knelt down and plucked a small dark blue bulb from a mass of thorny vines the color of old blood. In another month the bright blue blossoms of the mythene flower would cover the dull salt grass bringing an invasion of orange throated hummingbirds and the constant buzz of thiol wasps whose nests, far down in the damp hardwood forests, required a constant supply of pollen. Mythene, he recalled bitterly, was Pharsefena’s favorite flower. In fact, she was wearing a string of crystallized mythene blossoms, and nothing else, that late fall afternoon a few months before her death.

"What do you want?" she asked in the third language of machines.

"Many things," he said, pushing past her into the antechamber.

"You can tell them," her voice crackled with an emotion he didn’t quite understand, "that I will not relent."

"Them?" He walked casually across the small chamber and opened the door to her reclamation room.

The faint, sweet scent of benzene peroxide poured into the antechamber. Rows of bright blue lights embedded in the high ceiling flickered on as he entered. Without a word Phersefena followed him. She stopped next to her reclaimer and turned toward him; silent, her eyes centered on his face.

"The Contingency," he continued more to calm her than to break the silence, "has nothing to do with my visit. But, if I could speak for them, I might say that killing this man in such a public way is not particularly wise. Not now. Not when the separatists lack real support in the city." He knew the contingency, the secret assembly who, among many other things, controlled, as much as possible, the amount of knowledge the organics were permitted about machine society, was divided over the fate of Camoon. Ordrome, the council head, made it clear that his sympathies were with Pharsefena. Others were less openly supportive.

"He betrayed us," she said calmly, but pales waves of anxiety moved over her; those tiny fractal patterns the machines call fylene, the little fires.

"So this not personal?"

Phresefena flushed. "Yes, he betrayed me."

"What else?" He asked. She was trembling, very slightly but he knew her moods and her physiology.

"Nothing."

"Why the hunter’s mode?" he asked, waving at her naked body. Across the room her long metallic bow and a quiver of glass tipped arrows were stacked against the wall. "You could simply invite him here. No one would ever know," he said in a whisper although he didn’t know why.

She spun around. "Here? No organic has ever been in a reclamation room,"

"And if he was dead afterwards, what difference would it make?"

"It would still be violation."

"Why are you hunting him, Phersephena?" He persisted. "What thing, maybe, have you done?"

"Done?" She said, not quite a question, more like a statement. She came up to him and, studied his face, and leaning in, touched his chest with a cold, firm palm, just like the old days in Tuprefolle, when they would wake early from their room in the communal inn and walk silently through the cold silent morning beneath the yellow palms of the eastern gardens while overhead bright blue style sparrows chirped away. "I’ve done nothing," she said into his chest. For a few moments she stood with her eyes closed. "Nothing," she repeated.

He stood very still, giving her time.

"I loved him, Phaakron." Phersefena turned and walked to a high narrow window of blended glass. She stood quiet and still, her face faintly mirrored in the glass. In the distance, the amber and blue crystalline tower of the lighthouse rose out of the noisy congestion of the harbor. Beyond it, far away and partially hidden by late afternoon storm clouds, the black silhouettes of the Iron Mountains filled the horizon.

"What have you done?" He asked.

The harshness in his voice made her turn. "I took him with me into Cynotte."

Into the manufacturing incubators buried deep in the adamantine chambers below the ancient foundations of the lighthouse. She had taken him deeper into the world of high intelligent machines than any previous human, except, he mused, Talmede, Orme’s consort. And Talmede, he recalled, fled Tuprefolle one freezing winter night, pursued by seven huntresses of the city. Yet neither Talmede nor any of the hunters ever returned. "Unfortunate," he said in a flat voice, "but men have known for many ages that we have breeders scattered in many cities. Still, they have never discovered, Phersefena, the connections between the lighthouses. That was not a good thing to do. Still," he continued, trying to soften his reproof, "no harm comes from this. So he knows."

Phersefena stood very still. Tiny grey hexagonal waves rolled in thin rivers around and around her left arm. "We met Eistiedes, one of the memory smiths," she continued without looking at him, "he was outside the Inn of Trykoden surrounded by his own Axhe." The word meant mirror. "A test, I think. They all still smelled of the fixing bath. I forgot about Camoon." She leaned against the far wall. Her large, smooth breasts, laced with dragon tattoos etched in fine ivory lines, rose and fell in an anxiety reaction that even machines shared with humans. "Too late, Phaakron. I asked the memory smith which was the first. And he pulled out a tall lean man whose green and amber eyes flickered under the scarlet glow of the ceiling lights."

"Men know we grow new machines," he said, "that’s how we breed. Camoon has no reason to suspect these are anything more."

"New machines," she seemed to ponder her words. "Our children come into the world as all children, even the children of men, without knowledge of who and what they are. Tabla rasa. The first copy of Eistiedes was a new machine. But not a new mind. He was replicated. He was Eistiedes when he first saved a copy of his mind. A mirror image. "

"You think now Camoon knows?"

"Uncertain," she said.

"How much does he know?"

"More than he should. I’m afraid Eistiedes spoke unguardedly about his little collection of replicators; I couldn’t get Camoon way quickly enough." She pulled a long dark arrow from the quiver, its silvery adamantine glass point sparkled as she turned in back and forth under in the light. "He’s no fool and he’s pretty good at arithmetic. Putting two and two together and getting a strange version of four. A week later," she paused and ran her thumb over the razor sharp edge of the point, "he asked me why my name is among the machines killed two hundred and seventeen years ago when Sovenna lead her raid on the lighthouse. That’s one," she held up her right index finger.

"Then one day, he said to me, Phersi, how long ago did you come to Alcibedes? Why? I asked him. He said his grandfather, when he first heard that I was Camoon’s consort, told him an interesting story. Once upon a time," she looked at Phaakron without even a sliver of a smile, "he traveled to Tuperfolle in the autumn when the weather was cool and damp and the estuary was deep with yellow mud to work with Rykene, the famous tower builder. They were summoned to help repair the great lighthouse. One evening, a week after they arrived, a young machine woman, reputed to be a daughter of Orme came to the site. Her name, he told Camoon, was Phersefena. She was, he soon learned, a deep thinker among the few machines that still remained in the city. For those were in the years when the wars of separation continued in the marches north of the city.

"And pushing aside the workmen she weaved through the rubble and repair machines until she stood alone in the narrow doorway. ‘Foolish men, why are you risking your lives like this?’ She asked in a voice that belied her size.

"Rykene, dressed in knee boots and a dark blue tunic, climbed down from a scaffold floating on the north side of tower. Tall and thin, his face a molten field of wrinkles under an ill-kempt matt of bright grey hair, the tower builder stopped only a few centimeters from Pharsefena’s face. His deep chocolate eyes studied her face. ‘Go away mekanie, go. We have work. We are careful, see,’ he said loudly jabbing with his forefinger at a wide ring of turbulent air seven meters above them. ‘Boundary shield,’ he snapped.

"But Phersefena did not move. Her eyes remained trained on Rykene. In a smooth quieter voice she spoke into his face. ‘Go climb up as far as you will, but look,’ she turned slight and pointed to pairs of cables that snaked through the door and disappeared into the darkness, ‘you must not go down those steps. No organic is allowed.’

"‘I see no sign says Humans Keep Out,’ Rykene said slowly. As if to prove his point he stepped away from her and began looking here and there around the smooth, green adamantine walls of the tower. ‘Now leave us,’ he said sharply as he turned and started back toward the lift.

"‘There are perils here,’ Phersefena shouted after him.

"Rykene stopped. ‘I build many of these.’ He said with a wave of his hand. ‘Repaired many towers all cities where there are.

"‘But never here in Tuprefolle," Phersefena said. The sun rose from behind the tower. The boundary shield refracted the light, showering Rykene and his workers in a blizzard of tiny rainbows. ‘You do not know your peril.’

"‘Accident happen sometimes. But so what?’ Rykene replied.

"She passed out from the door through the shower of rainbows. The colors danced off her soft skin in a strange metallic glow making it seem as though she was waking through a c loud of shifting colors. ‘This lighthouse is," she paused, ‘different. It was built by the Visitor a long time ago. Before there were machines like me and before there were even men like you.’

"‘Men have been here very long time. Longer than this unwelcome guest from other world,’ said Rykene.

"‘But they were not men like you. They lived shorter lives. They often died of imperfections in their immune systems. They were alone in all the worlds for there were no other intelligent creatures in their world. They didn’t have machines like us. And,’ she glanced up the steep smooth walls of the lighthouse, ‘they did not have the visitor. They believed they were all alone in the whole of the universe.’

"‘And this is their reward for waiting?’ shouted a short pudgy woman with no hair and a flat smooth face. She had been sitting on the grass next to one of the adamantine glass cutters, obviously warming herself in its heat. ‘Are men now better off with his creature no one has seen for hundreds of years? And are we better off with these beacons of his -- lighthouses! -- just waiting for his own people to arrive?’

"Phersefena sat on a large bright fragment of fallen glass. ‘You have a visitor from another world living among you. You should be excited. He is lost and stranded on this tiny speck of dirt out in vast vacuums and dust and noisy stars of this little galaxy. Have pity on him.’

"‘Just the thing a machine would say,’ the woman said in a loud whisper.

"‘You and your kind don’t belong here either,’ said a thin young man in the orange protective suit of a glass mover. "We all know if it wasn’t for this creature, you wouldn’t even exist!" A hushed muttering like the hiss of steam spread through the work crew.

"‘We are not your enemies,’ Phersefena answered in a soft voice, ‘nor, as some would lead you to believe, conspiring with the visitor.’ The murmurs continued. ‘Just consider what you have done, here in the visitor’s adopted city. You have hunted down and killed his,’ she paused apparently to find the right word, ‘offspring. They, like the visitor, are strangers in a strange land.’

"‘And they keep coming back,’ the pudgy woman said loudly, as if that was an excuse.

"‘What has this to do with working in lighthouse?" Rykene interjected.

"‘Much," came a deep voice from behind Rykene.’

Phersefena dropped the slender hunting arrow back into her quiver. "Camoon’s grandfather remembered you. You were with me in Tuprefolle?"

"Unfortunately yes," Phaakron answered.

"Did I look like me?" Phersefena asked.

"No," he answered. Yes or no, too much knowledge about your doppelganger was always dangerous. It was an affliction among the machines, going by the name Axhethe, the mirror disease. "Do you remember the rest?" He asked, following Phersefena as she walked deep in thought across the room.

Phersefena turned. In the soft light of the room, her body glowed with a faint silvery aura. "Camoon’s grandfather," she said slowly as if she was having some difficulty remembering the story, "was an expert in real materials binding – the kind of tough fusion between stone and metals and composites like adamantines. He worked well with his hands and mind. But I don’t know much about his memory. Camoon seemed to feel he could remember the weather on a Tuesday five years ago.

"‘Much,’ came a deep voice from behind Rykene.’ Standing on a small knoll the tall, nearly emaciated figure of Phaakron the Chief Mediator cast a long wavy shadow. ‘This is the first lighthouse, built in the centuries when the visitor arrived. You know that, like all the lighthouses, it is a signal beacon. But beneath the cold layers of adamantine glass in this lighthouse,’ Phaakron nodded toward the tower, ‘still exists today the operculum to the visitor’s resting chamber.

"’What do you mean by resting chamber?" Rykene asked. Around him his crew nodded as if this was a crucial question.

"’Down those steps,’ Phaakron continued with a quick gesture toward the lighthouse door, ‘lies a small oasis, if that is the word; a small piece of his home world.’ Around the tower, the repair crew stared back at him with blank expressions. ‘An oasis on his world, of course, is a place of benzene peroxide under several hundred atmospheres.’ Phaakron paused, ‘a corrosive and poisonous gas under really hideous pressures. You would all die.’

"’So how,’ Rykene asked, ‘do we shore up the tower?’

"’We can help you. I will send Phersefena to work in the lower floors."

"’Even if she will not die," Rykene said, "she is such a small thing, even for a machine."

"Then Phaakron motioned to Phersefena and they watched as she picked up a huge slab of black adamantine glass and dropped it front of Rykene.

"But according to his grandfather," Phersefena said quietly, "she perished a few weeks later when a great pane of glass slipped from its moorings and crashed through the floor." Phersefena slung the quiver over her left shoulder and picked up her bow. Who died in the lighthouse of Tuprefolle?, Camoon asked me. That’s two," she said, turning off the lights and walking past Phaakron.

"Good hunting," Phaakron said with a sigh. And he stood in the empty room for a long time.


A late afternoon wind filled with moisture and the sweet scent of ozone was now sweeping steadily across the meadow. Lines of tall yellow and grey thunderheads brilliantly lit by bright flashes of lightening had moved over the rim into the caldera and out into the wide basin of the meadow. The boom of thunder quickly followed each flash of lightening. The high silvery sun, until recently shinning behind thin white clouds, was gone and a cold darkness fell over the meadow.

Just as the first few fat drops of the approaching storm began splashing into the vast carpets of salt grass, Amollede pushed back the canopy and emerged from the tomb. Phaakron tossed aside the Myllene bud. A hard furious rain swept over them.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked the retriever.

Amollede nodded. The rain was now a driving wall of fierce water. Waves of thunder rolled through the caldera. But as Phaakron turned to leave, Amollede grabbed his arm. Almost shouting over the sound of the driving rain and the clash of thunder he asked, "Did you ever catch her murderer?"

The Path to Phersefena's Tomb

Looking up into the Iron Mountains, from the hidden gateway of Ordrome.

And this is the path that leads to the Walls of Admonishment where ever vigilant devices of mechanical wardens, servants of a lower order, turn back all organic minds. Beyond the Walls of Admonishment the pathway leads steeply upward, into the Guardian Cleft whose narrow, vertical chimney ascends three thousand feet to the eastward rim of the Seven Ghosts and so down into the hidden meadow of Dulyde.

Kadidah

And here is Kadidah of Akhisar the acolyte mythologer whose songs of travelers from near-by stars written in the hexameters of ancient Greek first attracted Phersefena when she came out of the turmoil of Tuperfolle to the city of Alcibedes. But in the passing of the years, he went away to the island of Samoides, where Gemidethes the Observer had built a great optical telescope so that he might search the heavens for the incoming ships of the Visitor’s people. And so he gathered around him scientists and poets and disenchanted bureaucrats; lyricists who might tell the story of his quest and thus immortalize him in his own lifetime. Then Kadidah sent Phersefena his stories and his poems but came back to Alcibedes less and less often until he passed out of her life. And so one afternoon in the Tavern of Green Souls she met Camoon and henceforth Kadidah passed also from her memories.

Kadidah returned to Alcibedes in the late spring a few months after Gemidethes, in a drunken fit, locked himself in the tower of his telescope and permitted no one to enter the upper rooms. So Gemidethes starved to death that autumn when the storms came and the rains poured in the open windows and the great gears rusted and the perfect mirror was covered with fragments of leaves and layers of wet dust. And when he returned he sought out Phersefena and they met one warm summer night in the Inn of Deception and they drank chocolate liquors and had their fortunes read by blind machines of the lesser orders, and spoke of their lives and he read poems to her in dialects of long forgotten languages while they held hands and walked up onto the walls overlooking the sea where the three quarter moon illuminated the ripping surf in a pale light. Then they stood together while Phersefena told him of Camoon who knew little poetry and could not name the closest stars but stayed with her when the tides of the new separation began to flood the city. And Kadidah and Phersefena met in the taverns of Deception and Solace, and they walked through the gardens as summer passed into autumn, and they sometimes woke in each other’s arms in many of the small inns that bordered the mechanical quarters of Alcibedes.

But then came a day when Phersefena kissed him but would hold his hands no more, for the evil mood of Camoon was upon her. And she bade him return to his father or another lover, or the islands of Discovery where new telescope makers had cannibalized Gemidethes’ instrument, for she was done with humankind and had even that day sworn an oath to end Camoon’s betrayal. And so that evening, he met her at the Gate of Illusions, where the road ran eastward into the forests and then turned north into the mountains of iron and ice. And she was naked and armed with an assassin’s bow. Over her shoulder she carried a quiver of silver tipped arrows. Suddenly filled with fear and pity, Kadidah pulled her to him and kissed her cold lips and felt her bitterly cold skin against his own, for Phersefena was now a creature of her own kind and she no longer heated her body for the comfort of men. And she handed Kadidah one long arrow from her quiver and even as he took it, its point pricked his hand and he fell to his knees. And when he staggered back to his feet she was gone. And nevermore did he see her in the cities of man. For in the coming of the early winter, she had pursued Camoon out of the Iron Mountains and together they perished in the confines of Alcibedes.

After her death, when Phaakron the Teacher carried her body to the hidden tombs of the machines and would not listen to his suspicions, he left Alcibedes with his father and traveled into the mountains east of the city to the stronghold of Akhisar. For thinking machines of any kind are forbidden inside the walls of Akhisar; and here he thought, he could heal and after awhile, perhaps, he would forget Phersefena and remember no more the color of her eyes and the sound of her voice. And in Akhisar he wrote no more poetry and sang no songs of the stars and as the years passed the memory of Phersefena did indeed fade.

Amollede the Retreiver

And here is a rare image of Amollede, a retriever of souls, in its female gender form; for retreivers, like hunters and replicators, are bred as androgynous mixed morphologists. And retrievers are the deadliest of the autonomous machines, for they are tasked with returning their harvested souls at all costs.

There are bedtime stories told to human children by their lonely aunts and mischievous guardians about machines who haunt the dreams and steal the minds of little children. And how they take the shape of best friends and favorite dogs and sometimes the parents of particularly inattentive children. As in all truly terrible fables of thinking machines, emerging from the depths of an ancient folklore, many of these stories come from the tales brought out into the light of day by the mechanical lovers of strong headed humans. And of all these pillow talks, the haunting stories of the Retrievers are the most frightening for, in the retelling and the retelling of the retelling, come the images of mechanical creatures, tall and handsome with long fingers and golden eyes who can assume any shape and they go about in the deepest night when humans are asleep digging up the graves of freshly buried men and women to sell their body parts in strange markets and laboratories in the hidden cities of mechanical men. And often, when they can not find recent graves, they assume the shape of parents come to check on their children in the night, or, sometimes, they take the shape of moths or fireflies and crawl through the bedroom windows of young, sleeping children. For they can read the minds of all men and are especially attracted, perhaps addicted, to the night fears of little children.

Yet there are, maybe, tales that have a truth beyond our reckoning. For Camoon once said, in the final days of his flight, that the true story of the Retrievers could not be told to mankind for they work in mysteries of which we have no examples and no counterpart, and, in their duties to the high lords of the machine cities, the work they do is more frightening than ever we can imagine.

Akhisar

The carefully walled city of Akhisar sits on a broad knoll of sandstone and diluvial rock at the eastern most edge of a vast deep-water lake where the cold rivers Comena and Toryma meander down out of the high eastern mountains. Across the lake, running through dark cedar forests that stretch westward for seventeen leagues, the wild river Gamyra falls over many steep drops before it empties, a day’s journey or so, into the brackish estuaries north of Alcibedes.

Legend has it that Akhisar was founded by Sovena herself as a refuge for fleeing humans during the early days of the separation. And inside its smooth impenetrable walls she gave succor to the homeless, repaired the minds of the bewildered, and revealed to the leaders of men the weaknesses of the machines. And from Akhisar one mid-autumn night, under a clear harvest moon, she lead a force of men across the lake and down the river Gamyra where they came the next evening out of the northern marches and set fire to the great lighthouse of Alcibedes, killed many machines and smashed the alabaster statues of their forefathers. But Sovena was struck down as she ran across the Bridge of Coming and Going, wounded by the high frequency darts of Aswyth, the last surviving Guardian. Then her remaining company of the men, frightened and suddenly on their own, fled into the night and made their way to Akhisar where they were locked in the dungeons of lamentation and later put to death for their cowardice. But Sovena was carried away and no word ever came back to living men of her fate.

Yet even today, long years after the wars of separation, the city remains the domain of men. Machines are not welcome inside its walls, and even mechanical merchants, travelers, and ambassadors from the mixed cities of men and machines are turned away from its gates. And those who would enter the city in disguise, passing themselves as organics, are often put to death and their remains sent floating down the cold river toward Alcibedes.