Section 0: Prelude to Felicity

 

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

The mind that knows it is destroyed by time….

 

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind;

A retardation of its battering,

A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

 

A shadow in mid-earth…If we propose

A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time

And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

 

A form, then, protected from the battering, may

Mature: A capable being may replace

Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

 

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

The inimical music, the enchantered space

In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

 

—Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory”

 

The Cathedral rose from the twisted earth, a small thing next to the great things of nature, small too next to the equally great byblow of the wars of men. But it was an impressive achievement for the survivors who’d built it, a mere symbol, some would say, but a powerful symbol, they would have to grant. And he who’d designed it knew more: that there was a vast and arcane Function wrapped in that symbolic form. Like Babel’s Tower it was not only a monument to humanity’s strength, ingenuity, and ambition. It was also a tool, an instrument of those qualities of character as well as their sign. If it had only been a symbol, the heavens would have paid it no heed. It was the practical implications that made the Tower thing a divine controversy.

            The Cathedral had generally the shape of a slender cone, reaching up hundreds upon hundreds of feet, its needle tip buried deep in the sky. Along its length, ledges sprouted, and some bearing smaller cones, others different, stranger shapes. Near the ground, the cone grew smoothly outward into a flat base several times the width of the main spire. This base was divided into a tangled maze of chapels and halls, the places of worship and service that were the outward purpose of the structure, its public face. The portions of the spire immediately above were devoted to the Seminary and the University, where priests and philosophers were trained. Higher up, the Church had established its libraries and museums. The upper portions of the spire were for the use of the Cardinal himself; they housed his gardens, some of his private laboratories, and his quarters.

            To the Cardinal, too, belonged the depths—the vast basements and subbasements that extended farther belowground than the Cathedral itself did above. Here the great and secret works of the Church were undertaken, and in particular the sacred project that was the Cardinal’s special joy, to which he had secured—by reason, entreaty, bribery, violence, and deceit, as appropriate and necessary—the support of the Church’s inner circle.

            Today that great project was almost complete; the hour was fast approaching.

            The Cardinal awaited the time in the room at the very tip of the spire—his chronography room. Here were assembled all the myriad devices for the measurement, the precise delineation and specification, of the passage of time. There were sundials, waterclocks, all manner of clockwork—powered by motion or by spring—and analog and digital electronics powered by battery and sunlight, and thousands of hourglasses, along with a few weirder devices crafted by the new philosophy or the old Demon Science.

            Soon, he prayed, they would all be rendered catastrophically obsolete.

            Soon.

            It was 11:45 now, and his inner circle of Bishops, professors, and helpers were gathered before him, standing patient amidst the ticking, the dripping, and the falling sand, beneath the bright rays of the sun almost precisely overhead. He had been speaking to them of the great effort they had undertaken together, its great motives, and the goal so near to hand. Now he was ready to lead them below.

            “In the course of knowledge, there are three stages. In the first stage, the scholar can only observe and theorize, making heavy-handed guesses that reveal more of himself than of his subject. In the second stage, the scholar passes on to experiment, by which he tests the real limits of the subject, and finds its true character. In the third stage, the scholar ceases to test and begins to utilize his knowledge, transforming reality, intervening directly in the ways of things.

            “In science, we have witnessed the full course of this development—from the wild speculations of the first natural philosophers to the experiments of the great intellectual pioneers, to the triumphant Technologies of the industrial, atomic, information, and later revolutions.

            “But this progress became unstable; technology has turned into a tool of destruction that has warped worlds and devastated peoples; this planet, as you well know, was stripped of most of its atmosphere—so that only in the equatorial valley carved by a dying civilization is there any hope of life. The path of science has revealed itself to be inadequate; ask the broken earth.

            “Meanwhile, throughout history, the other side of knowledge has been neglected. We have only ever had a passive metaphysics, the speculations of idle priests and poets, whose beliefs became the song of authority, self-perpetuating, mindlessly reproducing.

            “But that has changed! With the waning of science, our great minds have turned to religion, myth, and magic; they have brought us the New Philosophy, made vigorous by experiment, giving birth to a wondrous new Technology, a metaphysical Technology to replace that bastard one spawned by science.

            “Like physical Technology, this Technology will give us unprecedented weapons. But these will not be weapons for the wars of men against men, but for the wars of mankind against its eternal enemies, those foes that have stood before the path of all humanity, of humanity itself.

            “First among these, that which I have assembled now to oppose, is the force called time. The ancient religions called it, “devourer of worlds,” the old philosophers knew it as the only tragedy. Time is what bars us from immortality, and time in the form of never-ceasing change is the root of all loss, all despair.

            “Inescapable, omnipresent. Every moment, we are dying. Every moment, wea re losing ourselves, our possibilities. If we could escape time, if we could imprison it, tame it, conquer it, what would we become? Free of death, we might achieve anything.

            “Today, humanity reaches once again the third stage. Today, everything changes, and eternity comes within our grasp, while death comes within our gunsights.”

            He led them to the elevator, which had been designed for this use on this day by just this party. It was a circular swath cut in the floor of the room, surrounding the pillar at the very center of the room which sheltered the path of a lone sunbeam into the immense darkness. With a flip of the switch, they rode that pillar down from the sky into the depths of the earth.

 

            The facility was composed of a series of vast chambers deep beneath the foundation of the city, in the bowls of the Cathedral. The chambers were steep shafts piercing down into the earth as the Cathedral pierced up into the sky; they were inverted cones narrowing to points like the teeth of some monstrous lizard.

            At the base of the central shaft down which the elevator slid, there was a massive machine—an army of machines, really, clustered around a central bell-shaped chamber—thrumming gently with its idle power echoing through the gloom. The machine’s central unit was a bell-shaped chamber, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, surrounded by innumerable satellite devices burning, turning, grinding and shining in eerie pulses of excess energy. There were two dozen such shafts, and each held such a host of machines. Power for them was drawn from the raging red depths of the world.

            In the central chamber, unlike the others, an Operator’s console was positioned at the peak of the Bell. The Cardinal mounted to it by the gilt ladder that was forbidden to all others, enchanted to spurn any living hand but his own. The console itself was featureless, silver sphere which yielded not to the sly fingers, but to the illumined will itself.

            He grasped it firmly, and set his eyes to the lenses, which hovered before him on a many-jointed arm. A second arm supported a ring of green stones, which he lowered upon his head, pressing sharp facets into his scalp. At the small but insistent inner pressure he exerted, the gateways were forced open. At that precise moment, the sun found its place so far over head, and its fullest light shone down the mirrored and lensed shaft at the center of the Cathedral, until it fell into the stygian depths, to be caught and warped in the emeraldine gems, so that the whole of the laboratory was bathed in a slow and watery light.

            In the lenses, light began as a pinprick and slowly swelled; while all about him the machine worked itself into a frenzy of bright sound. A thousand thousand voices began to sing in that dry space in the earth, and the lenses filled with the essence of time, the very stuff of the universe, naked and menacing in its divinity.

            Somewhere inside the Operator, the will that had commanded all the bitter remnants of humanity, the iron force that had carved towers from the desperate earth, faltered just a little as it touched the brutal fullness of the thing before it. Something broke within him, and he dropped down and down, jarred and battered as by a world at every plunge. Still he willed, though, still his mind commanded—

            It was as though the thousand voices of the machine were one voice, his one voice, measuring to the hour its solitude, demanding the isolation of a moment, severing it from time as a limb is amputated from a body.

            He never again stepped back from that console, or descended the gilt ladder. His lips never again parted in speech, but the thousand thousand voices of the machines spoke for him, shaking the darkness of the world, quivering in the very flesh and bone of those who listened; they said simply, “It is done.”