The Judas Mandala

by Damien Broderick

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Early in the 21st century, after the Great Recession, poet and young mother Maggie Roche is harassed by a lovely woman, Sriyanie, and a famous neuroscientist, David Elfield. She doesn't know it yet, but she is about to become history's first time traveler. When agents from the far future attempt to kill her, in baffled fury she slingshots herself into the 7th millennium. Instantly she's on the run from the Ull Lords and their virtual reality devotees. These superbeings are cyborged humans constructed to live forever, with the ambition to rule the universe. Maggie is having none of this. Encountering an earlier version of Sriyanie, her fated future role in the formation of the multiverse falls upon her shoulder like a thunderous lightningbolt. A Being at the end of time she calls the Something wages endless war with its foes, the Ull Lords. Torn from her beloved child and her own time, Maggie must choose whether to accept this alienating path into an alternative cosmic history fit for a poet and a free woman.

Release date: May 14, 2020

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 156

Sample

Because the courts permitted me to see my daughter every Monday, including leap years, there was at least one compensation for being out of work much of the time. (Thus, my recipe for saying yes to life.) So while everyone else toiled I took the ferry across smooth dark water to the sandstone terraces of Balmain, a snug inner-city gold mine where even the streaky old soap factories (bane of the allergic: invisible gusts of itchy soot) had long since been scrubbed out and refitted as condominiums.

Once the suburb had been a home for poets and ruffians, and before that the honest working class, whose ravages had by now been all but expunged. Native gardens soared from tiny plots in front of the terraces. These days the place was too expensive for poets, and the ruffians all spoke Program and their lawyers knew to a nicety the lyrics of judicial enchantment.

In all truth, I was in fair spirits. The afternoon promised to be a bitch, mad-dog mutual assured destruction at Social Security, but that was later. I pushed it away. The day was a delight. Up through the fragrant leaves of European trees meant for endless sifting rain the morning sky was hot blue yet pale: the heat in it was not Pro Hart’s electric enamel but a kind of shivery end-of-summer immanence, February in Sydney.

I went through Birchgrove park smiling, springy on my toes despite heavy hiking boots, and even found myself whistling until I realized with a burst of self-reproof that the park sound system was lilting out wimpy Donovan songettes, sticky with adolescent nostalgia and the dying falls of the misunderstood jongleur and scads of sea gulls. Perhaps there had been more sea gulls around forty-five years ago.

Megan turned from a complicated game with two other little girls and saw me coming up the slope from the sports oval. Shrieking with pleasure, she leapt to her feet, bolted for me, skidded, turned back to excuse herself politely. With some gravity and circumstance her companions allowed her to depart, immediately dividing between them her stock of imaginary play objects. Like a bright yellow bird she darted away again, shot down the grass incline into my arms, and up into the air, the hot transparent air.

“Good girl?”

“Mmm.” Suddenly she was shy, pushing her fat pink cheek into my shirt. I went with it, stood her on her feet and took her hand, walked back the way she’d come, up the path toward her school. They knew I was coming and without doubt had me under scrutiny on their monitors, but Spouse Access regulations insisted that I check through the formalities.

Our years put together come to thirty, Donovan told the magpies, almost getting it right. I grimaced horribly at Megan, causing her to laugh helplessly, and whistled along with the awful thing. It could have been worse. It could have been Vivaldi. I might then have broken a tooth clenching my face up, if it had been Vivaldi, plangenting away through the misery and love of a late summer morning as I went to check my daughter out of kindergarten for a few hours of the last remaining truth in my life.

Afloat on a dark hush of air, Sriyanie dreams of dancing.

The figures of her dream are vivid, defined, precise:

Taiko gongs, wind instruments play at Oibuki, pursuing independently their single melody. Each musician tones to the next beat, the following unison, departs again to his own clarity, her own autonomy. Sriyanie sees this clearly and her ears ring as the Gagaku orchestra brings jo to conclusion. With the other dancers she comes forward from the green room…

… yet she is distinct from them also, at once part of the dream and detached, spectator and creator, her dreaming self the stage.

All through the child’s sleeping flesh wafts a breath of subtle particles, response to every pulse of her central nervous system. Sensitive as flowers to the sun’s warmth, guardian machines inhale that fragrance, cherish her. Do they know she dreams of dancing? Not precisely. Tropic to the contours and gradients of her sleeping mood, they discern the flow of her burgeoning, the chemistry and alchemy of her pubescent mind.

Her dream has approached lucidity: she suspects that she is asleep. The watchful machines detect her disquiet.

Attaining this state of consciousness is an elementary discipline of the Third Level, and the child, the young woman, is at the verge of passage to Fourth Level. But Sriyanie has not intended lucidity. It troubles her.

The dream, though, is beautiful.

Under a pale green sky, many children watch the Bugaku dance in awed delight. They whisper to one another. Several hold hands. The youngest stir with a certain restlessness.

Upon the great platform is a damask-carpeted stage, and the black and red of the platform’s perimeter gleam against the grass of the meadow. The dancers move to a largo pace, then quicken their steps as the second movement, ha, is begun.

Joyfully, Sriyanie sees herself dance: the gorgeous Heian costumes—red, purple, and gold, the bright flowers in her hair, the flashing shifts of hue as the dancers disclose the hidden inner sleeves of their gowns.

Sriyanie is a bird, adrift. She knows (“she” “knows”) that this is Warawa-mai, the children’s Bugaku, a Left-dance, elegant and slow—her departure, in truth, from Third Level. She dances to a melody older than machines, older at any rate than any machine she has ever known, and its Ichikotsuchô mode is alien to the musical canon of her people, for it is based in a tetrachord; yet she has lived now with Karyôbin, the bird, for many months, and the archaic Nihonese music is an intimate caress across five thousand years.

Somehow that immediacy of its patterned beauty alarms her. The orchestration of her sleeping brain peaks and trembles; sadness and loss suffuse the images of grace.

Elsewhere, awake, her Friend is informed of the child’s grief and gets sighing to her feet, strangely moved by her little girl’s readiness to leave childhood behind. Engineered hormones have retarded Sriyanie’s physical development, freeing the child’s mind for spectacular growth; she has been prepubescent for close to thirty years. Now mind and body are ready to take the next elective step into maturity.

Beth speaks without words to the guardian machines, goes out into the night air. Third Level youngsters are not permitted to use the Transit teleportation system. For their Friends, therefore, walking is an obligatory act of praise.

In dream the kakko player strikes his side drum. They are in the kyû movement, dancing allegretto, the shô sounding to its player’s breath, the tiny hichiriki piping like a soul in agony, like the Kalavinka, the magic bird; in its complex entirety the music drones, it drones exquisitely. The dance is near its end. Gong and drum announce their coda of percussion. The dance is done; Sriyanie is exhausted and elated, transfigured; the child is asleep and the dance is in the child, is done, is in the past, is the past; the blind dance of Sriyanie’s closed eyes stills and she stirs, groaning, waking, the aninertial field holding her weightlessly aloft as she wakes, her mood confused and resentful. Beth is waiting in the dim light and takes Sri to her breast.

She holds the child at arm’s length and regards her with loving patience. Sriyanie smiles ruefully, knuckling sleep from her eyes, drops her hands to her lap and gazes at them. “I felt so sad, Ummy. Did I waken you?” Through the foul haze overhead a handful of stars glints.

“I was making colors, sweet,” Beth says, touching a loose lock of the child’s white hair. “You know I don’t mind. Would you like to tell me, or should I withdraw for a little while?”

Sriyanie smiles again, a sudden radiance. She puts her arms about her Other and hugs her tightly. “I love you, Beth. Please stay.”

For a time they sit in silence. The older woman sinks into receptive meditation, attending to the background murmur of the machines as they cherish the child’s integrity, watching her face through half-closed eyes, adding colors to her own private composition.

“I saw the reality of mujokan,” the girl says at last, slowly. “The—the fleeting impermanence of our lives, of our work. I dreamed the bird dance, and I saw how beautiful it was, and I thought of those silly, lovely Heian people drifting to extinction like falling cherry blossoms, all governed by tact and taste and ritual, and how their freedom was—was isomorphic to the rules of their world, and, I guess, how the uploaded Lords restrict us within the bounds of their own possibilities, knowing so infinitely much more than we ever can, weaving their tremendous stupid patterns out between the stars where we can never go, and we’re watching from behind the platform while they dance, hardly understanding any of it, and what’s worse, even the ull Lords themselves are contained by limitations of their own, by the cold illusions of their freedom, and Beth, it was so sad.”

Her Friend looks at her with tender concern. Eventually Beth says: “There’s a scene in one of Chikamatsu’s plays, Love Suicides at Sonezaki, where the lovers begin their final journey. Do you know it, Sri?”

Blinking her tearful eyes, the child shakes her head.

“It goes like this,” her Other says, in Old Nihonese:

“Farewell to this world

and to the night, farewell.

We who walk the way to death,

to what should we be likened?

To the frost on the road

to the graveyard

vanishing with each

step ahead:

This dream of a dream

is sorrowful.”

Barefoot, they walk in wet grass, sleeping flowers crinkling beneath their toes. A luminous theorem glows like fire in the sky above the Fifth’s arena, its axioms flickering in a gorgeous aurora of transformations. Sriyanie’s melancholy is dispelled in the crisp night; her breath puffs on the air; she feels a rush of love for her Friend, her friends, her world. Even the brooding ubiquity of the ull Lords, their energies cracking through the world like an invisible, inaudible electric storm, does not blight this new assent.

They come to Beth’s privacy, and the domestic machines welcome them with warm odors and warming vibrations. To Sriyanie’s astonishment, Beth leads her through a dull red shield to the Transit locus, then faces her for a moment, holding both her hands.

“Let’s go see the sunrise on the beach at Suva,” Sri’s Other suggests buoyantly, and the cues of her body, of her fingers are saying in an urgent kinesic tongue: Trust me, open yourself, expect change; little love, trust me.

“Transit! Am I ready? How wonderful,” the girl says dubiously. “I’m hungry, Beth—are you? Shall we have fish?”

Beth nods, and Sriyanie steps forward for the first time into the teleportation locus. The scintillation of Transit discontinuity sings in her body. She expects instantaneous transition to the resort dome at Suva, protected from the befouled environment by its filtration field. She expects to find people stirring to the new day, a tang of freshwater fish on coals, the boom of waves beyond the filter field, greasy, mother-of-pearl gloss of the poisoned ocean. Instead—nullity. Numb—nowhere—

The child screams, and there is no sound. Her mind plunges, flailing without motion. In the no-time before awareness is finally lost she clings to the memory of her Other’s hand: Trust me, little one, trust me.

Her central field of consciousness, of being, sustains appalling paradox. She dissipates, tenuous as vapor. Simultaneously she undergoes catastrophic implosion, the universe recedes, she suffers ultimate, singular density. Suspended dispersed, her being drones, drones exquisitely, to some derivative of the cosmic inertial frame.

It is dark, dark, deepest red. What are these forms, limpid, fugitive, a geometry of edges in gold and purple, gentle pressures, passing from nowhere to nowhere? She rocks back and forth, slowly, slowly to booming, delayed echoes. Bright stars reel past sunbursts tasting of gems. Light ebbs, rolling in pale bands and bands of darkness. Percussions rise and fall, pounding through bone and nerve as glimmer makes shadows, grow and thrum and dominate her rhythms like the throb of the ocean, like a primordial heartbeat…

Reality is a soft cage, a comforting restraint of vertical shafts, an irksome debility. She is depleted, miserable; she draws the warmth and the pale glow to herself, encloses it within her, sucking. Brightness regards her. Gratitude surges like a tide. There is Another. She reaches for the warmth, crooning with love, holding to that trust she has almost failed, and recognizes Beth.

Ummy, she says, Ummy, hold me.

Sri, her Other tells her, I love you, love you.

Painfully, exuberantly, she rebuilds her world. The void is not without form. At one pole she retains herself, at the other her Other. Between them, the pulse elaborates its grid, its field, its intricate, manifold relationships, its matrix. Does she build the world? Does the world disclose itself to her? She sees that both are true. She takes colors from the void and shapes them; they tint the patterns of the void. Many people laugh. Many people speak, disputing. Many people weep. She has invented them all. Beth is with her. She is not Beth. She is like Beth. She is like herself. She likes herself, and Beth, and the universe they have built. She turns, withdraws, broods, grows unhappy with her work. Why must Beth plague her with her presence? Violently, she repulses her Other. She modifies her work, tampers with its shape. She feels pain. She feels joy. She cannot find Beth, and she weeps, tasting salt. She is the sea and the salt fills her mouth, her hard teeth snapping against a melancholy of blood.

Ummy, she cries, hold my hand.

The world jigs and capers. Beth grips her hand. Strata slide and grind. She constructs taxa, and pays the toll, then giggles and groans at her cosmic pun. Expectation swells within her, seethes; she tenses her muscles and fixes her gaze, and grips Beth’s hand, and leaps—

They tumble together into sand. Sriyanie hoots, turns her shoulder into the hot white sand of a featureless beach (hot?) heels over head, comes up snorting and flops to her knees to stare at crashing waves. Beth brushes sand from her own hair and examines small shells. Sriyanie runs heavily to the edge of the water and dips her toes into clear, frothy ripples (clear?).

“Wow.” She scans out to sea. Tiny sails dance at the deep horizon. “It’. . .