Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

Usually I close my eyes while performing, but tonight I was looking around, wanting to witness the effects of our unprecedented “Surprise!” At first the pseudopods below and the chitinous limbs above were waving as if beating time. But as our modalities grew ever more intricate, the audience members fell still, staring at us with avid, glittering eyes.

I’m not sure when I noticed that the room had incalculably expanded—I think it was after Mimi began mixing a keening scream into her zeep emanations, and surely it was after Anders began folding full galactic symphonies into single notes and dabs of colour. The walls of the Café Gastropoda dissolved—not so much in the sense of becoming transparent nor in the sense of being far away—but rather in the sense of being perforated with extradimensional corridors and lines of sight.

Faces floated in the far reaches of the endless hallways, just like in Anders’s Wassoon-altered apartment back in Lisbon. And now, more clearly than before, I knew that these faces came from the unreachable distances and previous cycles of our world. They crowded in upon us like memories or dreams, endless numbers of beings, each of them rapt with our metamusic, each of them intent that his or her own individual soul song be sung. And, impossibly, Buckshot, Mimi, Anders and I were giving them all voice, our minds speeding up past all finite limits, playing everything, all of it, all the stories, all the visions, all the songs.

At first I hadn’t noticed the starspiders, but at the height of our infinite fugue, I realized the creatures were everywhere—as the spaces between the faces, as the shadows among the sounds, as the background of the foreground. The Piccolisima zeeps were showing me that only the transfinite sea of starspiders was real. Everything else was, in the end, only an illusion, only Maya, only a dream.

The starspiders clustered around us, and space itself began to bulge. Mimi, then Anders, and then, very slowly, LaFunke disappeared. A starspider had hold of my leg and was tugging at me too, ever so gently, ever so irresistibly. My leg was a trillion light-years long. I was about to let go, about to zeepcast the final mantric signal that would propel our tired old world to dissolve into the cleansing light of a new Big Flash. But something hung me up.

What was it that Anders called me? A nervous Nellie. I pulled my leg back, and with a dissonant sqwonk , I changed keys and hues, turning my incantatory dirge into a kind of demented party music, a peppy ladder of shapes and chirps that led the watching minds back from the edge. I kept up the happy-tune until the drab sets of consensus reality had propped themselves back up.

I ended my solo, standing alone on a stage in a pretentious nightclub on the jerkwater planet of Sadal Suud.

A moment of stunned silence, and then the audience began to applaud, in growing waves of sound. It lasted for quite a long time. Anders had taken them into the jaws of Death—and I’d brought them back.

By the time people comprehended that Buckshot, Mimi and Anders had truly disappeared, I was already aboard the luxurious Surry On Down , bound for home.

For a few days, nobody was holding me up for blame. But then they found the Bonze’s body and head in my Lisbon apartment.

The police met me at the spaceport this morning, when we arrived. I wasn’t in the right mental shape to put together a defence. I’m too distracted by my zeeps. I’m seeing infinity everywhere, infinity bare.

Only an hour ago, I was convicted of murdering not only the Bonze, but Mimi, Buckshot and Anders as well. I’m due to be executed by plasma ionization in just a few minutes.

And so… I’ve been using my last hour to zeepcast my exemplary tale into the ever-vigilant quantum computations of the ambient air. Those who seek my story will surely find it.

And now comes the final clank of my cell door. No matter. Never mind. I’ll be with Anders and Mimi soon.

I, Jallow Yphantidies, formerly Grand Consistor for the city of Hanging Dog, am solely responsible for the demise of the Great Continuity across the wide ekumen of Crossfoyle.

This confession has not been extorted by torture enacted by any of the Great Continuity’s old partisans, but freely given simply to set history on a sound footing, should any future record-keepers arise, in the wake of the forced forgetting. That aboriginal night of smoke, fire and chaos which heralded the death of one immemorial reign and the birth of a shapeless future was utterly my design. My motivation for triggering the grand apocalypse? The impossible happiness of a woman who despised me.

In this I was utterly inconsistent with my own Template, and this failing is the crime that still weighs most heavily on me.

The morning of the day I first met Margali Gueths had not been a particularly demanding one.

As always, my ekumen-sponsored landau awaited me outside the large bluestone manse on Vestry Street in the Saltman district, an imposing residence of many cornices and gables, accorded to him who inhabited the office of Grand Consistor.

Such an appointment lasted a lifetime, as did most such high offices. I had held the title for the past twenty years, and expected to hold it for a good number of decades more, having come to the position at the relatively youthful age of thirty-five. Everything in my Template had pointed toward my ascension to this post, and my continuance in office. And most certainly I would do nothing to veer from that consistency.

I ascended the landau, and the driver immediately flicked his whip at the rumps of the harnessed theropods. With meaty exhalations, the beasts lumbered off, their dirty claws clattering on the cobbles, drawing the coach at a pleasant pace through the summertime streets of Hanging Dog.

All about me, the city hummed like a hive of war-bugs in its early-morning busyness. Droshkies and cabriolets, bearing elegant ladies and prosperous gentlemen, streamed down the stony streets. Massive lorries stuffed with goods and drawn by huffing megatheres trundled sturdily along. Tradespeople and servants thronged the sidewalks. Storekeepers unrolled their awnings against the sun, set out signboards, and established pyramids of produce and pottery, ziggurats of books and bolts of fabric. I could smell random whiffs of manure, lamp-oil, and fish.

My large breakfast sat pleasantly in my stomach. The summer-weight robes of the Grand Consistor felt like a comforting blanket. I began to grow drowsy, without a care in my head.

Little did I know what awaited me that day.

Transiting through the Pangstraine, Nurbar and Whitechurch neighbourhoods, we arrived eventually at the immense circular colonnade that enclosed the stupendous Plaza of the Great Continuity. There I disembarked; my landau, its beasts and driver, departing for the government stables until needed.

Crossing through the serried stone Guardians of Continuity—the tall carved pillars of the colonnade were expertly shaped into the likenesses of those legendary icons—I experienced yet again the undying sense of majesty and permanence, of rightness and perfection, which the institution of the Great Continuity represented. Here, at this crucial nexus within our city and at identical sites across the ekumen, the wisdom of the principles of continuity were disseminated, cherished and upheld. The theories that had sealed our nation’s stability found here a tangible representation.

Beyond the pillars stretched an unimpeded acreage paved in veined marble. Already at this hour, the humid heated air here had begun to waver with distortions. The city of Hanging Dog was located in a broad fertile valley hosting extensive farms and orchards and small villages. But the mountains along our western edge invariably dumped moisture from the ocean-saturated winds arriving from the east.