The Fall of Hades (20 page)

37: THE BLACK CATHEDRAL

They stepped out from the maze of machines into a clear area, and found themselves facing the opening to an elevator shaft larger than any Vee had encountered yet. There was another, more striking difference as well, but before Adamn addressed this he explained,

“We are now officially at the outermost boundary of the Construct, and that elevator shaft does not officially exist. It used to be a major ventilation and utility shaft. Well, it does still serve those functions, but we’ve also adapted it into an elevator system.” They stepped in closer, while other people and Demons moved or worked about them. “We didn’t want to use any existing elevators for this, for the sake of security. This only stops at a few floors of our choosing, and the doors there are camouflaged. As far as we know, no one outside our colony is aware of it, or at least has wanted to cut through any adjoining wall to get at it. We’ve done a good job with it keeping its movement quiet—it rides nice and smooth.” Said with the pride of someone who had had a hand in that fact. “We’ve sealed off access to the shaft through even the smallest vent or grate on all the other floors except those it stops at, and there are cameras inside the shaft, too.”

“Okay, but what the hell is that thing inside it?” Vee asked—the obvious question. “It looks like a…church.”

A structure rested on the elevator platform, which appeared to have rails set into it that the structure could be moved along. The structure itself was in the form of a smallish, narrow-bodied cathedral, with an array of spires and steeples as serrated and threatening as knife blades or arrow-heads, most of them either bent or badly gouged or else broken off in whole or part. Its body seemed welded together from innumerable bits of machinery, like junkyard salvage forced into a whole and then all of it painted black, though now greatly splotched with corrosion. Steam gusted from various grates and orifices, and Vee thought it looked like an ancient steam locomotive wed with one of the weird Art Nouveau cathedrals designed by Antoni Gaudi. Set into its flanks were arched windows of red stained glass, with a circular red glass window over the double front doors. Inscribed into these iron doors were the words: THE SPECTRAL

DRAMA THOU THYSELF HAST MADE!—GOETHE.

“They called it the Black Cathedral,” Adamn said, “and like I told you, it was intended as a place of punishment—a mobile torture chamber.

The thing would move along tracks laid into the streets of Demonic cities, stop here or there for a while, and Damned would be randomly rounded up and taken inside. But the torture wasn’t physical. The subjects would be hooked up to a system that forced them to relive their saddest or most horrible memories. That’s what I was telling you—that we adapted its technology to help us with memory extraction put to more benevolent uses, and to perfect our interface with the Mesh.”

“But why do you keep it in the elevator?” Vee asked, watching as a robot Demon welded a metal patch to the side of the iron building amid a shower of sparks. Power cables ran out from the ajar front doors, down the iron front steps, to where they connected up with an apparent diagnostic cart on wheels, a human worker bent over its monitors and keyboards.

“Like I said, it’s mobile. It’s a vehicle. And aside from all the stuff we’ve learned from its groovy computer, it’s become the most important tool in my own pet project, in another way. Again, though, with a lot of adaptation.”

“And that project is?”

“Come on.” Adamn led her directly onto the spacious elevator platform itself, and Vee followed him around to the back of the iron building.

Here, the corrosion was much worse, the mechanical body heavily patched and reinforced. But drawing Vee’s attention more were the various drilling apparatuses affixed to the back of the Black Cathedral. There was one very large boring auger, plus a variety of smaller drills on boom arms, looking like robotic insect limbs. Adamn pointed and said, “These nozzles here shoot a powerful acid that can actually melt the volcanic rock outside. Adding them has really advanced the project a lot. Though the back-splash from the acid does do a lot of damage to the building itself, as you can see, so we have to keep up with repairs.”

Vee had herself witnessed how the acid used by the drone Demons could dissolve the pumice-like stone that entombed the Construct. “Why are you melting that? What are you drilling for?”

Adamn appeared to take in a deep breath, and when he spoke it was as if to a soul newly delivered into Hades rather than one trapped there for two thousand years, because that was what she essentially was. “In the past, before the Big Bang, Demonic administrators scanned the mind of each and every Damned that came into Hades, and based on what they learned from them they sent them off to different parts of Hades—a lot of times by train systems—to keep them away from any family and friends, since being with them might lessen their misery. But the amount of new souls after the Big Bang was so great that they didn’t have time to take these kinds of measures. After the Big Bang, if people died in proximity to each other, chances were they would enter Hades through the same portals, and would skip the…whatever you’d call it…orientation period the Damned would go through in the past. When I came into Hades, there were people who came in with me from the same town I lived in. Because of this, I’m pretty confident that my mother and brother and sister, who also died in the Big Bang, can’t be all that far from the portal I came through, which was close by to Tartarus. My mother was staying with my brother and I’ll bet anything they remained together when they came through. Given the scale of Hades, in the past I might never find them in an eternity of searching, but I think they can’t be unreasonably far from the Construct.”

“You mean, out there fossilized in the rock, Adamn?” Vee said, not sarcastically but with sympathy for what she took to be a surprising amount of idealism—or naivete—after two millennia in Hell.

“Maybe, but as bad as the deluge was, it was still gradual, and I bet most of the Damned found at least some kind of shelter before they could be caught out in the open like that. Not that we haven’t dug out scattered individuals from the rock when we burrow along, like you say, but there are who knows how many cities out there—either constructed by the Damned or the Demons or both—and smaller settlements like villages, and individual houses and shelters, and caverns even. Maybe no other city was ever able to seal itself off into one big unit the way we did with the Construct, but you could have two people in a little Damned-built stone cottage here, ten people in a cave there, people hiding in apartments in a big city, cut off from the people in other buildings but still protected from the Pompeii treatment.”

“But without life support systems like ours, they might be starving for air…suffocating in agony for century after century on the floors of these apartments.”

Adamn didn’t look too pleased by this picture, when his own family factored into the discussion, but surely he had thought of it before himself.

“Maybe. Or maybe they went into a catatonic state—shut down, like you did. That’s the way most of the individual people we’ve dug out have been. But we’ve had contact with people in one city called Oblivion through their own version of the Mesh, and some spotty radio messages from a further city, too. There are people out there who are
conscious
…but conscious or unconscious, we can go to them. It will take time, but time is what we have, if nothing else. Time enough to dig out every last soul in Hades, if I have my way.”

“There will be billions…and billions. Too many to take back to the Construct.”

“We’ll make the Construct bigger. But we’ll free other cities from the rock. I’ll dig out all of Hades if I need to.”

“But it’s your mother and sister and brother you’re really thinking of.”

Adamn’s face was grimly resolved. “I won’t give up on them. I’ll get to them and bring them here if it takes forever. Like I say, the Black Cathedral was designed to give us suffering. I take great satisfaction in using it to relieve suffering. We’re taking back our damnation, Vee.”

“But how are you doing it? How does the Black Cathedral get outside to dig?”

“Like I said, trains used to link up the far corners of Hades, and a lot of these tracks were underground, like subways. That was how the Black Cathedral would travel from city to city. Not all that many decades ago one of our exploration teams found it below the Construct in a sub-basement garage. This vent shaft goes all the way down there, so we made our humongous elevator and rerouted the cathedral’s tracks so we could bring the thing up here to be repaired and retrofitted, and protected when not in use. But down there, we’ve excavated some of the old subway tunnels it would use. These were either purposely filled in by the Demons during the Great Conflict, to keep enemy forces from sneaking into Tartarus from below, or else they were caved in by the pressure of the lava and volcanic rock. But we’ve been digging them out more and more, laying down new tracks when we have to.” Adamn reached out a hand and pressed it to the metal of the Black Cathedral, as if fondly touching the hide of some loyal beast of burden. “We’re close to reaching the city Oblivion now, and who knows how many people there. New friends, and new enemies too I suspect, but that’s always the way. We’ve already liberated a few small towns entirely, every soul that was in them. Many of them were in comas like I describe, but some who hadn’t shut down had adapted to being without breath and coped with it pretty well—blocked out the sensation. We’re very resilient creatures, Vee. You ought to know that.”

“I’d say you’re pretty resilient. Two thousand years hasn’t broken you.” She said it with true admiration, and not a little bit of wonder.

“You’re a rebel without a pause.”

“I told you, I feel reincarnated. Reborn.”

“Me too, I guess, but I think what I really want is to feel
redeemed
.”

“Redeemed?” He was studying her face. “Let me help you. I can take you in here—” he nodded at the Black Cathedral “— and help you get back the memories you’ve lost.”

Vee looked up at the closest of the blood red stained glass windows, its panes held in a metal web of strange geometric patterns like formulae from a sorcerer’s grimoire. “That’s not what I want, Wizard of Oz. I don’t want to go back to Kansas.”

“Well this here ain’t no
Emerald City, Dorothy.”

Vee’s mouth raised at one corner. “Ha. If I’m Dorothy, I guess my gun is Toto.” She stepped away from the Black Cathedral, and her expression became serious again. “No, I don’t want to remember, Adamn. I don’t want to dig up the past. That’s one thing I’ll kindly ask you to leave buried forever.”

38: THE SWIMMERS

She was floating in a sparkling, scarlet sea.

Far above her, as she swept her arms and pedaled her legs to keep from sinking below the surface, the night sky was sprinkled with winking red stars, some of them like shooting stars zipping this way or that. In one section of sky, the stars were so dense they formed a luminous curtain like a crimson aurora.

Vee looked down at the ocean she was buoyed in, its lava-like glow rippling over her naked chest and shoulders. She could not see far below the surface, but the water seemed a living thing made up of countless tiny red organisms. Rather than producing a feeling of wetness, they were a subtle electric fizzing sensation against the bare flesh of her avatar.

She was in Freetown’s library, surfing the Mesh. Well, almost surfing; in the distance she had seen a man riding a great wave of information on a board, and crying out,
“Whoo-ee!”
though the area she bobbed in was thankfully more tranquil. Rather than seeking out a particular book to read, however, she was trying to better acquaint herself with navigation through the Mesh, if she wanted to work closely with Adamn on his projects—particularly, join the crew of the drilling and rescue crew he supervised. For this was the vocation she had chosen to pursue as a citizen contributing to the good of Freetown.

Beyond the water’s horizon, a city of glittering red towers soared against the starfield, with what looked like huge red dirigibles and small darting red helicopters moving between those neon skyscrapers of information. Many of them were still ju
st skeleton frameworks and scaffolding, but the citizens of Freetown—and the Enmeshed, and those of Naraka, and even of L.A. and other colonies she hadn’t encountered—made this world larger every day. She wanted to go ashore and explore.

But she also wanted to submerge and explore the ocean’s depths, to see what treasures lay at its bottom, to better observe what appeared vaguely like schools of fish swarming around her legs down there. All in good time. There was so much time, as Adamn said. She was a novice, still learning the basics of swimming.

She cupped some of the water in her hand, let it trickle between her fingers, and watching it closely this way realized the particles it consisted of were actually numbers; computer code, each unit in itself nearly microscopic.

A huge fish, maybe even a whale, was passing below her beyond the edge of gloom, and she couldn’t help but feel uneasy at its size. Yet the pale, ghostly leviathan—or was it a submarine, filled with more experienced explorers than herself?—soon passed from sight, maybe sounding deeper, and she relaxed, let the waves cradle her up and down in gentle swells.

Then, her right foot was seized at the ankle. She gasped. She hadn’t seen this fish rising. Was it a shark? It gave a great yank, and Vee almost went under, splashing her arms wildly, nearly in a panic not to be drowned. Her slapping hands sent up sprays of phosphorescent droplets, like water falling past a strobe light. Like beads of blood flying from an ocean of blood.

The creature that had hold of her leg gave another, stronger tug, and this time Vee’s head was pulled below the surface, her eyes wide with terror. She looked below to see what had hold of her, at the same time that she kicked at it with her free leg.

The thing that stared up at her had a familiar visage, its own eyes ballooned with hate. It was not a shark, despite its menacingly bared teeth, but a man. It was the unclothed, swimming avatar of Pastor Karl Phelps.

His gritted teeth parted, and a stream of glassy red bubbles carried distorted, burbling words to her ears.

“So here you are, you traitorous whore! I’ve found you! Here in Babylon with the rest of the sinners!”

Could he drown her? It felt that way. Maybe not snuff out her spirit, but perhaps disorient it, so that it became lost down here in the deep currents of the Mesh for the rest of eternity?

She kicked out at his face, but the medium she was submerged in diluted the strength of her attempts and he batted at her limbs with his free hand. As she looked down at him, clamping her mouth shut for fear of her lungs filing with tiny red numbers beyond counting, she saw a white shape streaking toward the both of them like a torpedo. Vee’s dread was doubled, as she feared this time it would be a shark, for it looked like something of that kind. But to her surprise, this white streak drove itself into her father’s side. A great column of bubbles was disgorged from his mouth at the impact, and he let go of Vee’s ankle. As Vee churned her arms to propel herself back to the surface, she watched the white form turning sharply to come back toward Phelps a second time.

Absurdly, for a moment Vee thought it was Adamn’s dog, the white
Akita that had lunged at her father in the virtual shopping plaza. But no, its shark-like form belied that. And now, as the creature drove its long snout into the small of Phelps’ back, Vee realized what it actually was she was seeing. An albino dolphin, with eyes that were not only pink but a vivid red.

Jay,
she thought. Wherever he had been stored away or taken for study, he had been connected to the Mesh.

Vee didn’t linger to witness the avatar’s further attacks on her father’s avatar. Taking advantage of Jay’s intervention, Vee swam upward to the surface, and not only to the surface of the ocean, but broke free of the Mesh itself—and found herself in her library chair, lustily gasping for air.