Chapter Text
Take one:
N. Lakhani, bachelor of philosophy, comes into town on a gray day. Someone has just died. Ivan Alfyorov, patriarch of the Town and so-called immortal man, has just died. Long live the patriarch.
Lakhani had, if it can be believed, come more for the man than the immortal. For his radical theories on the transmigration of souls—not merely abstract but in fleshy, anatomical reality—he had been run out of Hyderabad in Sindh, then Gilgit, then St. Petersburg, persecuted by mysterious Powers since the first he had expounded on his philosophy. (Looking at him, one might wonder how such a mild-mannered person could inspire acrimony wherever he went. But the newspapers do not lie—even if they embellish.) He might have given up, had an associate not passed on the rumors about Ivan Alfyorov and his marvelous town, and his wild ideas on death. Ideas that aligned with his own.
So he is disappointed, but not in despair. At least here, Lakhani thinks, he will not be smeared, nor his lectures censored by the authorities. Perhaps he could stay and become a tutor.
A gentle, well-intentioned person, this Bachelor runs around fruitlessly for some days, trying only to do what little good he can.
When the Sand Pest emerges, he dies, because he has never studied medicine.
Take two:
J. Low, doctor of anthropology, linguistics, and sundry other disciplines accrued over a venerable lifespan, comes into town on a day the color of steel. She, too, has not studied medicine. But she is ungentle and her goals are altogether different. On behalf of a respected institution, she has come to study a culture on the cusp of steppe and city. The scarred young person who is her host peers at her with eyes of an alarming, algal green, and speaks of grand ideas, of the hope of humanity. She does not listen to them. Nor does she mind the designs of the brothers Iosava, or the canny words of Lukyan, heir to the Termitary. Even the charisma of Lyudmila, widow of the deceased patriarch, does not sway her to their cause.
But she is the Bachelor, and when she lays eyes on the Polyhedron, all is lost.
—or all gained, depending on who you ask.
V. Lakhani, adopted daughter of the menkhu N. Lakhani, comes into town, a murderer before she ever killed. Return is a relief in that it confers the quiet and solitude of small-town life, but the songs and verses of the Capital cling to her. This Haruspex tans doeskin for her gloves and looks to the stars too often. Still, she falls into her inheritance, for what else is she to do? The twyre at her heels whispers duty. The one-eyed foreman of the Abattoir awaits. The children are hers, even when they are not. The children are Sanya the thief, whose half-a-soul is a snake; and whispering Nikolay, the boy who talks to himself. Then there is Timur the fisher, whose parents had come all the way from Khabarovsk Krai who has become the second son of the Termitary’s owner; and Liza the toymaker, leader of the Polyhedron’s denizens.
And there are others. Seven in total, and rumors of an eighth.
R. Burmakin awakens in a shallow grave. They call him a killer and a thief, for with his steel bones and silver blood, that stolen skin all bronze, how could he be anything but? So he says he has a twin, for surely his God could not have permitted these acts. And because his body belongs to that very God, right down to the membranes in his throat, his words become the truth. So there is another man, with round little spectacles and the ordinary face that he no longer has, and his plague is one of gears and springs. The Town’s governing couple, each with the disquieting habit of adopting the other’s mannerisms, take him in. But even they find something uncanny about him, for he is not the sort of saint receptive to prayer.
The Inquisitor, accompanied by the unnaturally loud ticking of her pocket-watch, and the Commander, named for a term in musical notation, converge on the town.
Take three:
Hedwig, the Changeling, is a being of two minds. Each etched out in metal and circuitry, both copies of the same flesh consciousness that neither resembles exactly. Perhaps in another world she would wish to scale the Polyhedron, to be close to the high places of the world where crawls the lightning nearly touching, but in this one she is occupied by her own conflict.
In this world the Pest is not a plague of the flesh nor metal but of data, a memetic melody, a mathematical language, a coded message that transforms the listener into its willing agent. The infected become in mind what the herald of the electric age might be—chrome-plated, beautiful and shining, perfectly attuned to the thoughts of their coreligionists. Hedwig sees her God in the silver screen, in the miraculous shape of a future yet to come. Between her selves, this is the commonality.
This is the difference: one of her endorses this means of conversion. The other seeks alternate measures.
Perhaps this is the point of their divergence—if belief should come by choice first, or if faith compelled by circumstance is no lesser in the eyes of the Godhead. But who is the saint and who the shabnak?
Hedwig is—a reflection in a mirror or a camera lens or in the lens of your eyes, a daemon of infinite regression; she is a saint with the power of miracles, she is an inhuman monster engendered from humanity, she is a forgotten automaton gathering rust in the basement of the Theater.
Beyond the world is the stage, and beyond the stage—what did you expect? A sandbox, a number of dolls, two children in mourning clothes. In the dualistic universe of our cast they are, of course, the only gods who have ever mattered.
Gods of life and artifice, organic and mineral, children playing with dolls at the end of the universe.