Undr

Undr

by James David Audlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by James David Audlin

Cover photo by Marijke Taffein

Cover design by the author

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The title is taken from a story with the same name by Jorge Luis Borges; in no other way is this novel related to the work of the master. This novel is based on a dream dreamed the night of 1-2 October 1989, and was written 1 June 1991 - 6 August 1992.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.

PRELUDE

Mikel Smith

At the cliff's edge I saw a procession of torches flowing down the deep valley beneath me. Though the people who thrust them high against the night were hidden both by darkness and the miasma of the flames, I knew they must be there to carry the torches, descending slowly, like a glacier of lava, down from the glassy heights on my right hand, down toward the sea. These moving lights in the gloom beneath my feet reflected on the brooding surface of the onyx sky, creating constellations I did not recognize. And I heard the people chanting, joined together in a song that surged spasmodically from a deep groan to wails of pity or perhaps of pain, echoing off the cliffs between which they descended.

Something within me wanted so to join them, though I knew fulfillment of the wish would only lead to despair. But the bile of bitter desire kept mounting up in me, threatening to explode out of me like the urge to vomit.

Unexpectedly, shaking with cold sweat, my body lurched into action, thrusting and scraping through the bushes, with their thorns dragging at me like broken nails, to the edge. Looking over, seeing the people far down, directly below me, oblivious to my agonized observations, I found myself now close to being overcome with the irrational determination to jump.

But I found there was a way down, a rough-and-tumble slope where apparently a section of the cliff had given way, or perhaps a stream once had blindly fallen down to the cold valley below. I wrung purchase from the broken rocks, slipping on their cold faces, unsteady on my bare feet, gasping at the air for breath. Several times on that perilous descent I wondered at my nerve if not my sanity.

At the bottom, unmindful of my now disheveled condition I turned to face the procession of torch-bearing people. Someone thrust one into my hand, and I raised it up, adding my own light to this human river of effulgent devotion.

Where are we going? I asked the man beside me, the same one who had handed me the flame.

For a long while I thought there would be no answer. Then, without turning his face to look at me, he spoke. We are going to enter the seas of Undr. Do you come with us to worship and serve the Lady of the Awakening?

I heard my voice answer him, Yes. But the eddies and currents in this river of humanity sundered him from me, and I could not be sure he had heard my reply before vanishing into the flowing torrent of faces.

Unable to see anything but torches all around me, and having to place my trust in those before me for guidance, I followed the flames to their unknown destination. The wordless chanting rose from my companions to the invisible heavens, going again and again through its round. I found to my own surprise that one of the voices now joined with the others was mine.

As we processed down the valley I looked at the faces of my companions. Women and men, old and young, all naked, with all the variations of humanity represented among them. Their expressions, too, ran the whole range of feeling, singing the chant with anger, hope, fear, adoration, or ennui. What did they see in my own face?

The walkers ahead of me came to a halt. Ahead of us, a mere outline in the murky surroundings, was a prow of rock. On it stood a woman, flanked by two torches in sconces. I was too far from her to see her features clearly. She raised her hands and the chanting ceased. Then her fingers, like eyelids, closed down over her upraised palms, and she spoke to us.

"Children of Reality, hear me. You have been brought here to give back your reality, and to enter Undr. You have lived your allotted time among the Real. And now you go to join the ranks of the Unreal. Those who remain among the Real will think you have died. All they will have to ease their pain of loss will be the memories they will have of you. But you will be no more, and they will feed on cherished delusions before they, too, walk the path you are now walking.

"But do not mourn your fate. You are the fortunate ones. You have tasted existence. You have known what it is to be alive. The number of Unreal beings is far, far greater than the few who ever, like you, come into carnate form. And now you go back into the oblivion of Unreality, never again to laugh, or mourn, or hope, or fear. They who remain behind will dream of you, and think of you, and then their brief moments on the stage of existence will also come to an end, and they will stand here as now do you, and then leave reality behind and pass into Undr.

Now. Now come forward and, as you pass, give to the Tetagoar that within you that makes you real. Let the spark of existence that burns now within you fly back to its source, so some day others too may have their moment of existence. Come forward to me now... come...

And they began to walk again, one at a time, toward the woman. As each one passed her she lifted up her hands, palms open again, in what appeared to me to be a kind of blessing. Then they passed out of sight beyond her into a narrow defile. Somewhere in that yet deeper darkness into which they walked the light of their torches ceased to reach my eyes, and I could see them no more.

Fewer and fewer were ahead of me. I began to fear and to wonder what the purpose was of this ritual of which I had become a part. But then it was my turn, and I found myself moving forward toward the Lady. Like the others, I crossed the intervening space and stood momentarily before her. I expected the hands to rise, vouchsafing me her silent blessing.

But to me, as she had to none of the others, she spoke. You. You have not died. How is it that you have come here?

Her question confused me. What do you mean? I came down this valley with the others.

But before that. You have not made this journey with them. You cannot have. How is it that you are here? I looked up at her, and saw how beautiful she was for the first time. But those exquisite features were interrupted by hesitation and bewilderment. Her hands rose and hovered on either side of my head. You are dreaming! You are dreaming! Her hands remained near me, as if looking into my spirit. But you are not a Dreamer – how can this be?

Her fingers fluttered like a butterfly, as if they were whispering among each other, unsure what to do.

At last she spoke again, but still hesitantly. Come with me. I wish to show you the Tetagoar.

Something about that word, a name it seemed, inspired me with feelings of foreboding. But silently I followed her past the outcropping on which she had stood and into a defile swathed in shadows even deeper. I sensed weighty walls of rock leaning toward each other overhead, but could not see them in the gloom.

A fine mist of sweat from the piles of rock above settled on my skin. I was afraid to accept her leadership, but even more afraid to be alone now in this place.

We came to stone stairs, slick with condensation. With no time to consider the alternatives, I began to descend in the wake of the woman. The stairs varied in width; sometimes there was hardly room for my heel to come down, and sometimes I had to take several forward steps, feeling with my toes for the edge. Several times only my hands on the walls of rock that hemmed me in saved me from a dangerous fall. But even these were unreliable. Every now and then the cliffs squeezed in on us, giving us only a narrow passage, and at other times they flew apart, leaving me nothing against which to brace myself should I slip.

I found myself increasingly unable to keep up with the woman. The stairs did not descend in a straight line, but twisted and curved down through this crooked defile. She must by now be far ahead of me; at least I hoped she was still there. It was only concentration on not losing my footing that prevented the panic hiding in my intestines from lurching out at me. When sometimes I stopped, and the echo of my own footsteps died away, I could hear faintly the sound of dripping from the walls, but not of the woman’s own descent.

After what seemed an eternity I reached the bottom. Before me, silhouetted by the light of an ashen moon, was the woman, on the final stair. I joined her, our bodies touching on the narrow stone slab. Just before our feet lapped black waters, extending out as far as I could see, the waters of an endlessly troubled sea. The Tetagoar, she explained. This is the Tetagoar.

I don’t understand.

Through you, through you, Mikel Smith, the Unreals will enter your world of reality. Too long have we been shut out.

I don’t understand. What is the Tetagoar? What are you talking about?

We wish to be real, Mikel Smith. Why should the borders of reality be finite? Why cannot all things both possible and impossible be real as well? We have long wished for reality to be ours as well. Just as the dreams of you real people are made of unreality, we dream of reality. And, through you, we shall achieve our dream. You, you are our Tetagoar.

IN THOSE DAYS

Mikel Smith

Tell us a story, Mikel Smith.

I don’t know any stories.

You have heard stories all your life, on the Nets.

But I can’t tell them. I don’t have the words.

We can give you the words. Just open your mind to us, and we will find the stories in your memory and shape them into words.

I am afraid of you.

Do not be afraid. We will not harm you. We wish only to know your stories.

What stories?

The stories of what happened to you. Tell us how it all happened. We mean you no harm. Just open your mind to us now. Open your mind.

# # #

In those days we were all afraid, all the time. We went to sleep with fear, we woke up with fear. I think sometimes that we were so used to fear that, if it had been taken away, say, if we could have been transported to some world where there was no fear, we would have wasted away for starvation. Like an addict, we needed the poison our systems had not simply learned to tolerate, but had learned to crave. Without it we would have felt helpless, and would have struggled to drown ourselves back in that familiar fear again like a beached fish.

In those days there were two words that governed the whole pattern of our lives. The Scarlet and the Blink. These were the two Nets, and everyone, except the Nasties, of course, was a part of one Net or the other. It was through whichever Net we belonged to that we received the necessities of life: food, air, water, and entertainment. I was associated with the Blink.

Ruling the Blink was a triumvirate we called the Three. The Three were our masters, our parents, our benign protectors. It was not that they told us so, not that they drummed it into us every time we were on line, but that we knew it to be true. We made it true with our belief. We never saw them as despotic oligarchs because we would have been far too afraid to think of them as such. We thought of them rather as the ones who protected us from the Scarlet.

About the Scarlet we, those of us on the Blink, knew nothing, except that the Three insisted they were our enemies. I never knew, for instance, who their rulers were, like ours were the Three. Knowing nothing, we easily feared the Scarlet, for our minds boiled underneath their surfaces with imagination’s creations, the harvest of the seed planted by the Three’s teachings.

In those days I was a 2-RTA Sec-Mec officer. You probably don’t know what that means. Well, back then we had a vast number of complicated interlocking surveillance and operative organizations, which we called oporgs for short. They were all nominally part of the same vast system, but some promoted the wishes of the Three, and others the wishes of whoever ruled the Scarlet. Each oporg would work to thwart the wishes of the other Net, and ensure that allied oporgs were carrying out the orders given by its own Net. The Security Mechanics, or Sec-Mecs, for whom I was a mid-level eye, mostly watched the Numbers, a Scarlet oporg, and the Secret K’s, one of our own oporgs, to make sure they stayed correct. I am sure there were groups who watched us, but, if I ever knew which ones of the hundreds of oporgs, operative organizations, had the task, I have since forgotten.

My primary assigned duty was to watch the Nasties, to make sure that they stayed at each other’s throats, not joining together in a coalition that could cause us real damage, and that they kept the Undr machines in working order. It was typical to give eyes like me, with relatively less experience, this kind of job, to prepare them for the more difficult and important work of watching the Numbers and the Secret K’s.

It was one afternoon. I took a break to relieve myself in the men’s room at the very bottom of Tower Natron. That is, of course, to say I was deep in Nasty territory. I was inexperienced, and showed my contempt for them by daring them to plug me while I stood facing the urinal. It was really atypical of my genode to take foolish risks like this, but, as you will hear, I had a penchant for going against type. Still, despite such lack of sense, I survived to tell you this story.

The men’s room was hardly that any more. The entrance door had long ago been torn away. The metal partitions that once had defined the two stalls for the sit-down toilets had apparently been torn away by the Nasties. The walls were entirely hidden behind years of filth and graffiti. One toilet was completely missing, leaving a tendril of exposed pipe in the linoleum, as I recall, and the other had half of its bowl cracked away. There was, of course, no water. Either the Nasties had tapped into the main for their own needs, or Aqua had turned it off to conserve it for the people living in the Tower up over my head.

So the place smelled, as you can imagine. It smelled of years of human waste from many bodies, representing the by-products of a large assortment of cuisines, in various stages of putrefaction. Besides the immediate unpleasantness of the foul stench, there was the shock of such lack of responsibility. Human waste was precious; not a bit of recyclable nutrients is to be squandered in a world now devoid of natural foodstuffs.

There was one small pleasure to be found in this unpleasant place, and that was the air vent up above. It exhaled the sweet perfume of clean, pure air. Somehow, in unavoidable contrast to the foul smells, this little breeze of processed air smelled even sweeter.

Nobody went Outside in those days, of course, except with a portapack, and even then it was uncommon. The world had been rotted by war and pollution, by exhaustion of its wildlife, and by the proliferation of mutant microbes, so the only clean air was manufactured. The Uppers, of course, had plenty of this clean air. The Lowers had tolerable enough, clean but foul-smelling, and the Nasties barely got enough to survive. They got it, because they were needed to keep the machinery in Undr operating efficiently, but every now and then some politico or other introduced a bill to cut off their air and suffocate them out of existence.

Anyway, it was a rare and secret pleasure in my life to go to this men’s room. Whenever I was in Undr and had to pee, I always went there. Even if I was some distance away, I would still walk all the way just to do it there, instead of doing it wherever I was, like the Nasties themselves, just for the sake of the glorious satisfaction of relieving myself with my face turned up, eyes closed, drinking in the cool cataract of sweet air.

The day in question had been its usual tough one. First, Twidge had been more persistent than usual, begging me to pud her in exchange for some buzz. As always I tried patiently to explain to her that, as she should know perfectly well, Sec-Mecs don’t pud, and, even if I did, it wouldn’t be with her, as she was too immature. And I reminded her that buzz was illegal, and a Sec-Mec was hardly going to give buzz to a Nasty. She kept looking at me mournfully with her eyes both too old and too young, mouthing her desperate entreaties. At last I just walked off, ignoring her, continuing my rounds.

Then I had caught three young Nasties squeaking nosh from one of the turbos. I would probably have just ignored them, because they weren’t really doing anything unusual. But they gave me mouth and went into fight mode, and I pulled my snuffer.

"¡Yah, esclavo! ¡Hedes de nosh y network!" one shouted. I said nothing in reply, not because I was that imperturbable, but because anything worth saying was beyond my abilities in Spaniol. I would have wanted to say if they just squeaked their nosh and didn’t break the turbo I had no quarrel with them. But Nasties have never been known for their diplomatic skills. They saw me as the enemy, the intruder into their territory, and, I suppose, from their point of view, they had every right to hate and fear me.

Crouched like animals, they made no move as yet, but continued to taunt me; the words were slangs I didn’t know, but the general sense was clear enough. In the back of my mind I was reviewing the fact that it was quite unusual to see two N’s teaming together, and considerably rare to see more than that, as I was now. I watched them intently. Nasties were always unpredictable, and I had to remain calm. I flipped back the safety on my snuffer with my thumb, trying to do it without their picking up the action.

But clearly they noticed, or had anticipated my move. They instantly separated and approached me on three sides, one swinging her chain, the other two waving long knives and broken bottlenecks, and grinning nastily. I plugged one of the pair quickly, to lower the odds. He slipped down to the floor of the fac without a sound.

The other two N’s tried to rush me. The one with the chain swung it at me. I ducked away, fortunately, because my first impulse, to duck down, would have brought my head right into the swinging arc. I could feel more than see the knife wielder rushing me from behind.

I snapped a shot at the one with the chain next because she had the longer reach. She too fell. The last one, the one with the knife, bolted. I waited, looking around carefully, but in the fac there was only the sound of the turbos, ceaselessly recycling the waste into nosh and sending the latter through the Towers.

It was now that I went to the men’s room, three levels down and two wards across, my senses as always on alert. The stairways were the most dangerous, as always. They were long vertical tubes, with flights of stairs boxing in an open central shaft that extended the whole thousand-plus levels of Natron. Anyone, at any time, could reach over and plug me with numchuks, snuffer, or anything.

But I encountered no one. Once I heard the sound of a fight, but it seemed to be coming from the level above. As always I took my snuffer out and came carefully around the edge of the men’s room doorway, just in case anyone was in there. But, as it almost always was, it was empty. I took my pud out and relaxed. In moments the hot stream of urine flowed into the discolored drain. I sighed. I turned my face up to the wonderful cool downpouring torrent of fresh atmosphere, letting it smooth the clammy furrows of my brow.

A sound brought my eyes open, my senses to full alert. My groin muscles semiconsciously squeezed tight, shutting off the flow of urine, and my hand went to my holster. The sound had come, I realized within a moment, not from behind me, not from the open doorway or the corridor beyond, but from the air vent.

From my vantage I could see nothing beyond the grillwork but darkness. I put one boot up onto the lip of the urinal and lifted myself up to it. My nose pressed to the cold aluminum, and I peered through, still seeing nothing. But the grillwork felt oddly loose. My weight pressing against the wall, I pulled at it with one hand. It came away easily, exposing the empty air shaft.

There was no one in sight. But there was something, something light-colored in the shadows deep inside. I reached in and touched it. It was, my fingers told me, several sheets of paper. I took them out, glanced at them, saw a