* * *
I have played the game of mind before, have clasped hands with others who thought themselves strong. In their minds, in their souls, in them, I have seen things. In dark grey tunnels I have traced the graffiti of their ancient scars. The quicksand of their insecurities has clutched at my boots. I have smelled the rank odor of their fears, great swollen beasts who dwell in a palpable living darkness. I have burned my fingers on the hot flesh of lusts who will not speak a name. I have ripped the cloaks from their still, quiet secrets. And then I have taken it all, been them, lived their lives, drunk the cold draught of their knowledge, rummaged through their memories. I have been born a dozen times, have suckled at a dozen teats, have lost a dozen virginities, male and female.
Kleronomas was different.
I stood in a great cavern, alive with lights. The walls and floor and ceiling were translucent crystal, and all around me spires and cones and twisted ribbons rose bright and red and hard, cold to the touch yet alive, the soulsparks moving through them everywhere. A crystalline fairy city in a cave. I touched the nearest outcropping, and the memory flooded into me, the knowledge as clear and sharp and certain as the day it had been etched there. I turned and looked around with new eyes, now discerning rigid order where initially I had perceived only chaotic beauty. It was clean. It took my breath away. I looked everywhere for the vulnerability, the door of gangrenous flesh, the pool of blood, the place of weeping, the shuffling unclean thing that must live deep inside him, and I found nothing, nothing, nothing, only perfection, only the clean sharp crystal, so very red, glowing from within, growing, changing, yet eternal. I touched it once again, wrapping my hand about an outcropping that rose in front of me like a stalagmite. The knowledge was mine. I began to walk, touching, touching, drinking everywhere. Glass flowers bloomed on every side, fantastic scarlet blooms, fragile and beautiful. I took one and sniffed at it, but it had no scent. The perfection was daunting. Where was his weakness? Where was the hidden flaw in this diamond that would enable me to crack it with a single sharp blow?
Here within him there was no decay.
Here there was no place for death.
Here nothing lived.
It felt like home.
And then in front of me the ghost took form, grey and gaunt and unsteady. His bare feet sent up thin tendrils of smoke as they trod lightly on the gleaming crystals underneath, and I caught the scent of burning meat. And I smiled. The spectre haunted the crystal maze, but every touch meant pain and destruction. “Come here,” I said. He looked at me. I could see the lights on the far side of the cavern through the haze of his uncertain flesh. He moved to me and I opened my arms to him, entered him, possessed him.
* * *
I seated myself upon a balcony in the highest tower of my castle, and drank from a small cup of fragrant black coffee laded with brandy. The swamps were gone; instead I gazed upon mountains, hard and cold and clean. They rose blue-white all around me, and from the highest peak flew a plume of snow crystals caught in a steady endless wind. The wind cut through me, but I scarcely felt it. I was alone and at peace, and the coffee tasted good, and death was far away.
He walked out upon the balcony, and seated himself upon one of the parapets. His pose was casual, insolent, confident. “I know you,” he said. It was the ultimate threat.
I was not afraid. “I know you,” I said. “Shall I conjure up your ghost?”
“He will be here soon enough. He is never far from me.”
“No,” I said. I sipped my coffee, and let him wait. “I am stronger than you,” I told him finally. “I can win the game, cyborg. You were wrong to challenge me.”
He said nothing.
I set down my cup, drained and empty, passed my hand across it, smiled as my glass flower grew and spread its colorless transparent petals. A broken rainbow crawled across the table.
He frowned. Color crept into my flower. It softened and drooped, the rainbow was banished. “The other was not real,” he said. “A glass flower is not alive.”
I held up his rose, pointed at the broken stem. “This flower is dying,” I said. In my hands, it became glass once again. “A glass flower lasts forever.”
He transmuted the glass back to living tissue. He was stubborn, I will say that for him. “Even dying, it lives.”
“Look at its imperfections,” I said. I pointed them out, one by one. “Here an insect has gnawed upon it. Here a petal has grown malformed, here, these dark splotches, those are blight, here the wind has bent it. And look what I can do.” I took the largest, prettiest petal between thumb and forefinger, ripped it off, fed it to the wind. “Beauty is no protection. Life is terribly vulnerable. And ultimately, all of it ends like this.” In my hand, the flower turned brown and shriveled and began to rot. Worms festered upon it briefly, and foul black fluids ran from it, and then it was dust. I crumpled it, blew it away, and from behind his ear I plucked another flower. Glass.
“Glass is hard,” he said, “and cold.”
“Warmth is a byproduct of decay, the stepchild of entropy.” I told him.
Perhaps he would have replied, but we were no longer alone. Over the crenellated edge of the parapets the ghost came crawling, pulling himself up with frail grey-white hands that left bloody stains upon the purity of my stone. He stared at us wordlessly, a half-transparent whispering in white. Kleronomas averted his eyes.
“Who is he?” I ask.
The cyborg could not answer.
“Do you even remember his name?” I asked him. He replied with silence, and I laughed at them both. “Cyborg, you judged me, found my morality suspect, my actions tainted, but whatever I might be, I am nothing to you. I steal their bodies. You’ve taken his mind. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
“I never meant to,” he said.
“Joachim Kleronomas died on Avalon seven hundred years ago, just as they say he did. Steel and plastic he might wear, but inside he was still rotting flesh, even at the end, and with all flesh there comes a time when the cells die. A thin flat line on a machine, glowing in the darkness, and an empty metal shell. The end of a legend. What did they do then? Scoop out the brain and bury it beneath some oversized monument? No doubt.” The coffee was strong and sweet; here it never grew lukewarm, because my will did not permit it. “But they did not bury the machine, did they? That expensive, sophisticated cybernetic organism, the library computer with its wealth of knowledge, the crystal matrix with all its frozen memories. All that was too valuable to discard. The good scientists of Avalon kept it in an interface with the Academy’s main system, correct? How many centuries passed before one of them decided to don that cyborg body again, and keep his own death at bay?”
“Less than one,” the cyborg said. “Less than fifty standard years.”
“He should have erased you,” I said. “But why? His brain would be riding the machine, after all. Why deny himself access to all that marvelous knowledge, why destroy those crystallized memories? Why, when he could savor them instead? How much better to have a whole second lifetime at his disposal, to be able to access wisdom he had never earned, recollect places he had never been and people he had never met.” I shrugged, and looked at the ghost. “Poor stupid thing. If you’d ever played the game of mind, you might have understood.”
What can the mind be made of, if not memories? Who are we, after all? Only who we think we are, no more, no less.
Etch your memories on diamond, or on a block of rancid meat, those are the choices. Bit by bit the flesh must die, and give way to steel and metal. Only the diamond memories survive to drive the body. In the end no flesh remains, and the echoes of lost memories are ghostly scratchings on the crystal.
“He forgot who he was,” the cyborg said. “I forgot who I was, rather. I began to think . . . he began to think he was me.” He looked up at me, his eyes locked on mine. They were red crystal, those eyes, and behind them I could see a glow. His skin was taking on a hard, polished sheen, silvering as I watched. And this time he was doing it himself. “You have your own weaknesses,” he said, pointing.
Where it curls about the handle of my coffee cup, my hand has grown black, and spotted with corruption. I could smell the decay. Flesh began to flake off, and beneath I saw the bloody bone, bleaching to grim whiteness. Death crept up my bare arm, inexorably. I suppose it was meant to fill me with horror. It only filled me with disgust.
“No,” I said. My arm was whole and healthy. “No,” I repeated, and now I was metal, silver-bright and undying, eyes like opals, glass flowers twined through platinum hair. I could see my reflection gleaming upon the polished jet of his chest; I was beautiful. Perhaps he could see himself as well, mirrored in my chrome, for just then he turned his head away.
He seemed so strong, but on Croan’dhenni, in my castle of obsidian, in this house of pain and rebirth where the game of mind is played, things are not always as they seem.
“Cyborg,” I said to him, “you are lost.”
“The other players,” he began.
“No.” I pointed. “He will stand between you and any victim you might choose. Your ghost. Your guilt. He will not allow it. You will not allow it.”
The cyborg could not look at me. “Yes,” in a voice tainted by metal and corroded by despair.
“You will live forever,” I said.
“No. I will go on forever. It is different, Wisdom. I can tell you the precise temperature reading of any environment, but I cannot feel heat or cold, can see into the infrared and the ultraviolet, can magnify my sensors to count every pore on your skin, but I am blind to what I think must be your beauty. I desire life, real life, with the seed of death growing inexorably within it, and therefore giving it meaning.”
“Good,” I said, satisfied.
He finally looked at me. Trapped in that shining metal face were two pale, lost, human eyes. “Good?”
“I make my own meaning, cyborg, and life is the enemy of death, not its mother. Congratulations. You’ve won. And so have I.” I rose and reached across the table, plunged my hand through the cold black chest, and ripped the crystal heart from his breast. I held it up and it shone, brighter and brighter, its scarlet rays dancing brilliantly upon the cold dark mountains of my mind.