Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen
Part Fourteen
Zach certainly looked like he could be the world's oldest man, but Ernest's steady diet of old-time feeds, even with their strange splices where characters reappeared lounging in bed or recovering in the hospital, had taught him a modicum of skepticism.
"What is a bedpan, and what does it change into?" he asked.
Initially, it appeared that Zach was laughing. He rocked, and made a rattling sound that approximated a chuckle. His teeth slid in his mouth. Peculiar. If Ernest were to shunt in to L0U15E that night, he would order some feeds on homo sapien dentistry, just out of curiosity, to see how their teeth were connected. But he wouldn't be shunting in. And he was dehydrated. And bleeding.
And his head throbbed fiercely.
The shaking and wheezing slowed, and between tremors and gasps, Zach said, "Never mind. Never mind. I can still use the commode. With your assistance, of course."
Zach wheeled his mechanized apparatus around, and Ernest cut his eyes to the door. He wouldn't be able to sustain his conversation much longer, not without revealing that he was no health monitor. Zach, whoever, whatever he actually was, clearly had a depth and breadth of vocabulary, and the implicit experience that came with it, that would doubtlessly reveal Ernest for what he truly was: a heretic.
But Zach's apparatus moved between Ernest and the door, and it was, as Ernest had feared, very fast. "This way," Zach said.
Ernest followed.
The apparatus stopped at the threshold to another room, where the smooth wooden floor transitioned into tiles. It whirred, adjusted the height of its wheels, and moved forward.
An old-time bathroom, with its fixtures intact. "I thought you said the plumbing didn't work," Ernest said.
Zach wheezed and shook, and his teeth slid just a bit. "You're definitely more fun than the last one. Come on, then. Help me hold it so I don't fall out of the chair or piss myself."
Ernest still didn't understand, and he said so. And as Zach's instructions grew more and more specific, Ernest realized all at once what the problem was. "You need to urinate. Why didn't you say so?"
Zach's trousers had a convenient access panel at the front. But the angle at which he needed to hold himself to aim his stream toward the toilet was indeed precarious. Ernest positioned himself so that his damaged arm didn't have to bear any weight, though that meant he needed to hold Zach's penis with his shunt-arm hand without the blood showing.
Ernest hoped the walnut-sized field of vision was as small as Zach had implied.
"Yes," Ernest said. "You are in position."
"I can see that."
"You can?"
"It's an expression, a figure of speech. Never mind. I know I'm in position. Just give me a second."
"A second what?"
Zach sighed. "Forget it. You wouldn't understand."
"Explain."
Zach gave another rattling sigh, then cleared his throat. "It takes a while."
"Oh. Yes. I've seen a pertinent feed on the topic. Imagine a river…."
"It's not shy bladder, you ninny. It's my prostate. Size of a grapefruit by now, I imagine. Not that you'd know what that is." He breathed another long, weary sigh. "Back in my day, researchers fought the ravages of age. Now? Now all they care about is optimizing the productivity of each and every clone."
"You're implying that's negative."
"My boy, my boy…."
The urine stream started, weakly, more of a dribble, and it was a strain on Ernest's decoupled shunt to aim it at the toilet. It stopped as abruptly as it had started. "That's it," Zach said.
"That's all? Perhaps you're dehydrated."
"What I wouldn't give to piss like I used to. Standing up. Of my own volition. Like a racehorse."
Ernest settled Zach back into his apparatus and closed the access panel on the front of his trousers. While he fastened the panel, a drop of blood fell, and spattered on the back of Zach's withered hand. Ernest stared in dismay.
"You should see to that," the old man murmured.
Ernest backed away and turned to run, but the wheeled apparatus blocked him from the bathroom door.
"Those towels will do." Zach waved a trembling hand toward some cloth hanging from the wall. "Wrap it up. Go ahead -- they're clean."
As Ernest bound his bleeding arm, he wondered exactly how long Zach hand known he was not actually a health monitor, but decided he had nothing to gain by asking.
"I'm needed…outside," he said, hoping Zach would be willing to forget about the bleeding and return to the ruse. "There's another patient whose data I must confirm. As soon as possible."
"What were you in for?"
Ernest's shoulders slumped.
"Embezzling?" Zach suggested. "Gaming during work hours? Or…what? You don't strike me as a violent sort. You eunuchs seldom are."
Ernest wasn't sure what a eunuch was--perhaps some other profession where a high I.Q. was required. But he did remember the seductive heft of the old pipe in his hands, and the way he'd nearly used it on the security op's skull. "I stopped shunting in," he said. Because it seemed safer than admitting that, deep down inside, he might very well be violent.
"The feed on urination got you curious enough to drink something, is that it? Well -- is pissing all it's cracked up to be?"
Pissing. Ernest filed the word among all the other new things he'd accumulated lately. "It's a relief, I suppose. But I really do need to leave now."
"Of course. All you need to do is get past me."
Ernest shrank back against the basin, which was a cool, hard pressure on his rump.
"How hard can it be?" Zach said. "Knock me down and walk away. Or snap my neck. Put me out of my misery."
Ernest stared.
"No?" said Zach.
Ernest shook his head. His ears rang, his arm throbbed, and now he found it difficult to breathe.
Zach sighed, a long, rattling sigh turned into a series of hacking coughs. When they subsided, he said, "No, you don't have it in you. I'm glad. They should've dipped into vat C754 more often. Then maybe everything wouldn't have gone to hell in a handbasket."
The wheeled apparatus responded to a gesture so small it looked almost accidental, a twitch of yellow-nailed fingers, and Zach wheeled around and rolled out into his room.
"I can go?"
"You can. But tell me, first--humor an old man--where, exactly, will you go?"
"Out."
The chair spun. Ernest imagined the walnut-sized field of vision was now trained directly on his face. "Out. Yes, yes, I see. Through which exit?"
"Which? That must mean there is more than one. Good. I will walk until I find one."
"In the course of your training--not for medicine, we've established, though you are partial to the medical feeds, and you seem to retain what you learn, and even extrapolate upon it--whatever it is you've trained in…do you know how to read schematics?"
"Simple schematics. Yes."
The apparatus whirred and is angle changed. Zach pointed over Ernest's shoulder. "Find the book Saint Peter's in the Twenty First Century. Presuming you can read words."
Ernest spun around, and for just a moment, forgot all about the throbbing in his shunt. The walls to either side of the room's entrance were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. Real books.
"It's royal blue, with gold embossed letters. Three centimeters wide, or so."
Ernest pulled the book from the shelf. It felt so much heavier than the books in Will's reading room, and not only because it was larger. It felt denser, more substantial. It had heft. Like the pipe with which he'd nearly struck the security op.
"Flip straight to the end, and you'll find the fold-out plate with the map of the cathedral. It's easy enough to spot. The edges of the page are thicker."
Ernest located the page and opened to it. A schematic (on paper!) folded out, twice the width of the book. Blocks of information that an AI would normally supply were interspersed throughout the schematic. One read: The stained glass windows, comprised of over ten thousand pieces of colored glass, were lost in the riots of 2072; and another: Due to the religious practices of the early twentieth century, St. Peter's plumbing system bypassed the municipal water supply, and therefore, remains active even today.
Zach said, "New construction isn't on there, of course. That was published in 2100, and the plastic and fiberglass monstrosity that's called the Deaconate didn't start being extruded and pasted onto the cathedral for another couple of centuries. But this map…this'll get you to the only exit in the Deaconate that isn't monitored, fully monitored, every minute of every day."
Ernest turned the book sideways, considered the diagram, the "map," as Zach had called it, and then set it on a table, beside a bowl of…what was that grayish, viscous stuff? It had a peculiar odor.
"It's too heavy. I'll never be able to carry it."
"Take the map."
Ernest spread the pages carefully. "I don't see how to detach it."
Zach's rattling sigh sputtered a bit toward the end. "Tear it out."
"No."
"It's my book. I said, tear it out."
Ernest closed his eyes, and thought back to the security ops' handiwork in Will's reading room--piles and drifts of cracked bindings and broken pages, piles so vast they covered the entire floor. "Once you ruin something physical, you can't command it to undo."
"It heartens me to see that they haven't bred sentimentality out of us yet. Truly, it does. But take the damn map or they'll hook up that shunt of yours long enough to give you one final IV. A sedative. That's how they do it. Drift off to sleep and never wake up again. That was the way they culled the population of dogs, right around the time that book was printed. You probably don't even know what a dog is."
"Rin Tin Tin," Ernest muttered; it was one of the stranger feeds he'd ever seen. Flashes of the stuttering, gray and white feed of the animal scaling a wall five times its height warred in Ernest's mind with images of himself receiving a shunt-in that would put him to sleep, once and for all.
"Rectory. That's where you are now. Proceed south, through the nave, and then the staircase beside the pulpit. Ho-ho, too bad I can't come with you. I'd love to see you tackle those stairs."
Ernest did not volunteer that he was familiar with the use of a stairway. He located the area on the map. It looked like a series of lines. Which was almost the way a stairwell actually looked, he realized, if you were staring at it from the top or the bottom, and looking at the risers. Homo sapiens must have been more fluent in pictograms than Ernest had previously supposed.
"And the lower level?" Ernest said. "This chamber is marked 'elecrical.' And this, 'storage.' Those little rectangles, those are the doors, correct? I don't see any on the exterior wall."
"Because the exit came later, after the Diaconate wrapped around the rear and consumed the Gospel side of Saint Peter's. They knocked a hole right through the transept so they could hook up their high-tech charnel house."
"I didn't parse a majority of what you just said."
Zach swung the constricted gaze of his single eye around the room, then allowed it to light, again, upon Ernest. "Never mind that. Bring the map over here. Hold it up so I can see it. It's been over a hundred years since I've seen the undercroft."
Ernest did as he was told. He steadied the book so that the map was centered a half-meter in front of Zach's face, though his shunt arm ached terribly, and tiny gray motes swarmed in the periphery of his own vision.
"The Church faces east, and the Diaconate surrounds it. Gospel-side, south, is Reclaim. Find that stairwell, go down, and keep heading south. The staff at Reclaim isn't quite as puffed up with testosterone as the rest of the Diaconate thugs, and there's fewer of them, too, now that the fight's bred out of everyone else to the point where they turn in their PODs and climb into the crematorium themselves."
"It must have been altered since you've seen it last," Ernest assured him. "There is no crematorium in Reclaim. The bodies are demagnetized now, so that that soul may soar free upon the death of the body."
"What year do you suppose mankind discovered his soul was magnetic?"
"Well, I… I never thought about it. I'm no student of theology. With the proper feeds…."
"Forget the feeds. Everything worth anything was Purged. And then -- coming out of the far side of the Purge -- that's exactly when the magnetic soul scripture was penned. Just like that ridiculous 'tongues are for talking' commandment."
Ernest fought hard to keep from blurting out the other uses he'd learned lately for tongues, he and Will. It seemed that Zach would listen, and maybe even shed some light on the way nothing Ernest had ever known seemed to fit logically with anything else any longer -- and talking about Will, and reveling in the things they'd shared, might soothe Ernest's longing. But if Ernest was to see Will again, what he really needed to do was escape the Diaconate.
"Take the map." Zach grasped at the page and tried to tear it out, but his grip was weak, and the paper slipped from his fingers.
Ernest looked at the building schematic one more time, then closed the precious book's pages, and set the volume on the table beside the strange bowl of grayish stuff. "I have the map," he said gently. "In my biological memory. Thank you, Zach."
Zach's fingers twitched and his apparatus whirled so that he faced the window again, and when he spoke, his voice rattled with phlegm. "Go then, my beautiful liar. Walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Godspeed."
Ernest paused in the doorway and took one final look at the bald curve of the top of Zach's head, what he could see of it over the apparatus' head rest. What a peculiar man. Homo sapien? Most certainly. As old as he claimed to be? Probably not. He just had access to more interesting feeds, and was very talented in the art of lying.
Now that Ernest had seen an actual homo sapien, the thought that Will had been anything other than homo consumatis seemed absolutely ludicrous. The bristles on Will's chin? The guards had them, too. Testosterone. That seemed to be the key. He thought, for just a fleeting moment, that the next time he saw L0U15E, he'd have her do a search on testosterone and see what she could tell him. But of course he wouldn't. Thanks to her tattle-strip, L0U15E was in the Diaconate impound. If the components that made up L0U15E hadn't yet been disassembled, demagnetized, reclaimed. If L0U15E, as Ernest knew her, even existed anymore.
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