Five hours of archival research later, Tara hung in the astral void above a living god.
Kos Everburning, like all his divine ilk, did not quite exist in the usual, physical sense of the term—but human minds weren’t good at comprehending n-dimensional noosphere entities, half-network and half-standing wave, propagating in all directions at once through time. They could, of course. Tara had worked out the theory from first principles back at the Hidden Schools, the derivation of divine anatomy from raw data being a particular favorite of problem-set-dependent TAs. But nightmare matrices did the math for you these days, if you didn’t mind shifting some particularly difficult problems to universes where they happened to be easier. Then, back-convert the mess to three spatial dimensions with a fixed arrow of time—and, since everyone who’s going to deal with this particular simulation will be a Craftswoman well versed in anatomy and forensics, add a filter to present the data analogically in terms of corpses. Just don’t go too far, since a simulation this detailed is a new cave chamber inside the old philosopher’s cavern, and if you’re not careful you might tunnel into another chamber already occupied by capital-letter Things.
Even convenient fictions can delve too greedily and too deep.
Tara’s head ached, and she was in desperate need of a second lemonade. She’d started after lunch with a deep dive into the Court of Craft across town, where carts guided by rat brain brought her volume after volume of notes and ledgers. Claims there matched her notes from last night’s survey, but she needed more, and so returned to the sanctum to pace above Kos Everburning’s body.
The diagnostic Craft she used had been built to display Alt Coulumb’s God in cross section through time: a three-dimensional flip-book showing a naked continent-size man whose limbs hung limp in a dark sea, whose face shone too bright to look upon. It was meant to deal with well-structured archive data.
It wasn’t made to model the living operations of the God.
She watched him—watched Him, the capital letter inserting itself slyly despite her insistence that adulation of a client was counterproductive.
She heard Him breathe.
His heart beat and blood surged in His veins. She’d thought to walk on His skin, to take inventory from up close as she had when He was dead, but the closer she drew the harder it was to keep her heart from matching time with His, to keep His heat from suffusing her.
Even at this distance—a mile up in notional space, far enough away that she could see His edges—Kos distorted the surrounding world. So much so, in fact, that she almost didn’t notice when the simulation tore.
A ripping sound filled the synthetic dark as great wounds gaped in the fabric of unreality.
Multifaceted eyes stared through diamond slits, and spider legs clawed the void. She called on her Craft, forged chains of light to stitch the cut universe back together.
When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, she searched for the problem’s source.
She didn’t have to search long. She recognized the scream.
Abelard had taken shape in the nightmare half a mile beneath her, spinning over the Body, arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to steady himself. The glowing tip of his cigarette trailed circles around him.
She stopped his spin with a thought and a slight tweak of the dream’s parameters.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“How you get used to that, I will never know.” He brushed stray hairs back into his tonsure, and straightened his skewed robes. “Um. I seem to be upside down.”
“Gravity’s relative to your body here. Your modesty’s safe. You really should go.” She righted him with a twist of her forefinger.
“I hoped we could talk,” he said when he recovered.
The stitches with which she sealed in the sky surged as the Things beyond adjusted their attack. “This isn’t a good time.”
“What are you doing, anyway?”
“Looking for evidence,” she said. A stitch gave way, and a tendril of shadow wormed into the dark. She shredded it. “I wanted to see how Kos owns the sky.”
He pointed up. “What are those?”
“Demons. Don’t worry about it.”
“Sounds like I should.”
Vines of light wound about the wound, and sharp darkness tore her bindings from within. “I’m running a lot of poorly structured data through the system. Too much of that and the nightmare snarls. Demons are like us, really—but their worlds work on different logic than ours. Points of divergence let them cross over without a summoning contract, without limits. You have to work hard to make one of those in physical space, but analytical engines aren’t continuous. If I break the simulation, they can get in.”
“That sounds bad.”
She swooped toward the body, and brought him with her. “Annoying, mostly, here in n-space. If they breach, we pull out, shut the simulation down, start again. So long as we don’t bring them back to the supposedly real world with us.”