Topic: Mercator Arc
The Codus
The hand trembled as if afflicted with palsy, the fingers splayed wide, reaching. It was an ancient skeletal thing, thin layer of taut muscles straining under a mottled gray parchment of skin roped with a net of veins, and draped tight over cables of tendon.
The summoned man the owner of the hand reached for stepped back in horror, as if to be touched by such a thing would set him to death by nanophage. The living corpse had surprised him by lunging out of the chair that seemed to have been made of thick slabs of black marble. There was no distinction between the chair and the floor it merged with, or the walls and ceiling of the circular room. The jaw in that sunken face fell open. Eyes like hard little marbles filmed with cataracts gleamed in a cone of light that seemed to shine down upon them from nothing but a point in the air.
“He has come,” the living corpse said in a voice strong and confident, not from the vocal cords, but from a phonic array in the thing’s mouth.
It is not a thing, Rector Doud reminded himself. And he—he!—is not dead. Apaxan machines had kept him alive, machines so refined as to be indistinguishable from biology. Machines that made the implants woven throughout Doud’s body seem like clockwork by comparison.
The hand fell upon the Rector’s left shoulder, clutching, steadying the frail being that pulled itself erect. Doud gasped. It was like being touched by death. What had they called it in the Deep Antiquity? The Grim Reaper? Yes. Give him a hooded cloak and a scythe and he would be the very picture.
“The war is over,” the living corpse added through his breathless mouth. His eyes were fixed at nothing in particular, as if looking through Doud, or the wall. Or the planet. The man had long since transcended optic senses.
Doud’s hand had moved to the cuff hanging from the skinny arm, but stopped short as if it could not complete the command to grip that wrist, even to pull it away. “Who has come, Codus?” he asked through quivering jaw, breath fogging out of him; it was always cold in here.
The Codus’ head dropped suddenly as if his life-force had just fled from the news. The grip on Doud’s shoulder lessened. “Joachim,” the Codus whispered. He seemed on the verge of collapse and Doud did then take the man’s wrist as it slipped. He thought to be gentle so as not to fracture the birdlike bones, but the flesh felt strong and unnaturally dense beneath his own. Doud helped the Codus to the chair.
“Who is this Joachim?” Doud asked. “Has Pavona sought to intervene?” They would be no better governors.
The Codus sagged in the chair, motionless as a true corpse, like a robot shut down. Or a puppet laid aside. His voice had wound down from its youthful command presence to something tired and worn out. Something that better matched his physical form. “The white god . . . who has become as his bride.”
Gibberish. Doud frowned his displeasure. The Codus was capable of steady lucid insight, which often trailed into whimsical nonsense. Doud felt agitated as well. Something was not quite right. He felt pending doom as if he were about to step off a precipice. Hadn’t the Codus sometimes said someone was coming to stop the war? It was always a possibility that someone from the Expanse would step in, so Doud never thought such comments remarkable. But hadn’t the Codus said the same a time or two before the war even started?
He believed so. The trouble here was that the war took them all by surprise. No one saw it coming. They all believed themselves better than that, but tensions between the factions escalated and within a single twenty hour day, violence erupted.
Violence begat violence.
Both sides fought to destroy the antipodal other.
But in his crazy talk, the Codus knew.
Or did he? There was always a war somewhere at some time, and someone would stop it. It was as prophetic as saying a man would find a coin. The Codus wasn’t a prophet; Doud never made the mistake of believing so. The only prophet was Iman, the Last Prophet, and the only war he warned about was the Final War.
And Iman never tossed out zingers like “the man sheathed in milk will battle the licorice god.” And to hear it said so seriously added a pathetic humor. At first Doud laughed at the absurdity of the phrase being uttered with such dreadful sincerity. After a while, the repeated expression became tiresome. The old Codus certainly believed what he was saying. And that was the saddest part of it all.
A bride-like white god and a man sheathed in milk . . . were they the same? No, Doud stressed to himself. Senseless drivel from a mind mostly broken.
The curved part of the wall behind the throne lost some of its thereness. Forms wiggled through that vaporous section. Cloying odors filled the room. Apaxan. They moved forward on three thrice bifurcated tentacles spaced equally around the low bulbs of their dark, splotchy bodies. A short thick stalk connected the body bulb to a fanning triangular . . . Doud had no idea what to call it but it looked like a lateen sail from one of the proa out on the sea, bulging full of wind. It was like a head, but it was so much unlike a head. It swelled in the middle above the stalk root to each tip and thinned at the edges, a trio of thin tapered proboscises waved from each apex, tucked between them, closed puckered orifices. The edges along the lateen were lipped slashes, bordered with small fleshy barbs and open pores. The lips seemed to be forever propped open by a grillwork of cartilage, exposing a purplish-pink mat of wet spongy matter beyond.
Odors vented from the pores, the chemical mode of communication of the apaxan. The beings had two other modes. One was by sound, more a cacophony of animal noises than any human language. The other mode was what they would soon do. Doud had seen it before.
The throne of the Codus began to recline and an opening seemed to eat itself into being at the headrest. The apex probes of the three apaxan found their compatible orifices as they met around and under the throne, entangled. They were neurally connected, but their number was insufficient to give rise to an emergent separate identity. The apaxan under the headrest reached up with its probes, finding the pores in the Codus’ neck.
The old man twitched. The head lolled and Doud thought the fragile sinew holding it to his torso would tear and allow it to fall. The jaw had never really closed, and the alien puppet masters had no need to make the face point in Doud’s direction. The young Rector stood before them with his hand cupped over his nose, listening to their commands issue from the phonic array in the Codus’ mouth.
“Joachim must not find us. Calculations prove trustworthy. Seal the path to the adyta.”
It made no sense to Doud. His grandfather Redhlan had found the adyta under a pile of rubble a few kilometers away from the nascent settlement along the arc of the crater sea. Redhlan had cleared a path to the vessel and the things inside had let him in. He trusted this secret only to a few men and erected the first rectory over his discovery. Doud’s father inherited the secret, passing it to his son.
The apaxan had told them many things, the old Codus who was kept alive by arcane science was a veritable library of history. The Church had its records, the Deep Antiquity carried with them during the Exodus from Earth. However, the living corpse had filled in details time had otherwise eroded.
And now they wanted it sealed? “I don’t understand.” Doud hugged himself in the cold.
“Seal the path. Isolate us.”
Doud shook his head. “But when should the path be reopened?” To lose this conduit of knowledge sickened him.
The apaxan undulated against one another. Their connections overtly sexual and a bit disgusting. “Joachim will open the path upon his appointment.” And that was that. The apaxan under the back of the reclined throne withdrew its probes, strings of some vile liquid trailing the ends.
They disconnected from one another, and with a fetid haze ambled the way they had come, through the doorway that phase shifted in and out of solidity.
The throne returned to its pre-union state, the Codus slipping and sagging, settling like a forgotten doll. The hard marble of his eyes looked at nothing.
Doud rubbed his hands together, cracking his knuckles. “What happens after Joachim opens the path?” he wondered aloud.
The Codus startled the young Rector with his tired and worn down answer. “Rebirth.”
Rector Tadian Doud did as the apaxan bid. Someone did come and put an end to their trivial little war. He had not come from the Greater Pavonan Expanse, but from another arm of the galaxy, from some other human inhabitancy of which they had had no contact. Other than himself, the man was known as Joachim to only the Codus and the apaxan. Doud held the secret of the name in deathly fear. Such disclosure would surely open the path to the apaxan adyta by another means.
Joachim had slipped past the denial field of metal hungry microsatellites that mined geosynch orbit, and singlehandedly infiltrated the Homesteader colonizer whose Calisennial Era technology had been the primary factory of the war machines below. The faction holding Cratertown would certainly have won against those that wished to dispose them had Joachim not destroyed all the ships on the landing plane south of the rain filled crater. That had gotten everyone’s attention. The mysterious out-worlder had discovered the means to activate the Homesteader’s horrible weapons, devices intended to landscape undesirable terrain. The remains of the parked spacecraft were twisted imploded slag.
The warmongers realized they had a new master.
That was twenty-nine years ago, the Rector reflected, or forty by the reckoning of the Sacred Calendar, the keeping of time from Earth the Church had kept. The scientists of Deep Antiquity had held the opinion that the Earth was not special. But God had not sent His two Sons to the apaxan and their mortal enemies who took the Earth for their own needs. The Earth was indeed special in that regard.
And the planet Mercator . . . its hour was so close to the Sacred Hour that the difference in a few seconds was trivial enough to dismiss. And what to make of the buried and hidden adyta, and the apaxan inside that seemed to be waiting. The aliens were up to something, that much the Rector could guess. What, he had no idea. They wouldn’t disclose their plans, and the semi-dead Codus, whose name had never been disclosed, was never much help. Whatever their schemes were, the apaxan were confident that their calculations were trustworthy, an oft repeated phrase. Had God selected Mercator for some special purpose too?
Shortly after Mil Kariden left his service, the Codus appeared to him. The Rector sat at his desk, deep in the business of administrating the parish when he felt a presence. He looked up to see a man standing in his office. His weave was receiving the image, though the source of the transmission was not discernable. Doud had no doubt it came from the adyta below the foundation of the Rectory.
The image of the Codus was not that of the living corpse he recalled from so long ago, but as a healthy young man, muscled under his simple tunic and trousers. Soft luscious curls framed his head, falling to midway down his neck. His lips were full like a child’s, and his eyes were those of a mother watching in melancholy her children growing to adulthood.
“You must take your parish out of the city.”
The Rector blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Trust me as you always have. You must leave. Joachim will take his revenge against one of his lost.”
The Rector frowned and dropped his eyes from the man to gather his thoughts. When he looked up, jaw moving to speak, the Codus was gone.
It was hard work, and he had to fabricate some excuse as to why he wanted to move the Parish, but he got it done. Rector Doud’s justification carried a hint of truth, or enough truth that his congregation could believe it because they could see it with their own eyes. Cratertown wasn’t improving. It remained a depraved and immoral place. The Parish was an island that could not lower the sea level. They were welcomed in a hidden cleft of rock, a place called Sacred Valley.
The parish settled in, and Doud waited with heart heavy in anticipation for some unspecified event to transpire. It wasn’t that much of a wait, and when the event happened he was filled with sick awe and sadness. He sobbed, but God was wrathful against wickedness, and Doud had brought salvation to all he could.
Joachim uncovered the path to the apaxan adyta.
Inside, Emanuel stirred.
While I was writing "The Rector", I had the idea that what if Doud was a Codus, but not just any Codus, but the First Codus Iman. I thought, "Naw. Too much." That lead to what if he is a Codus of three apaxan who were descendants of the apaxan of Iman and had Iman's knowledge and memory? (The offspring of apaxan carry the memory of both parents, and certain strands could remain viable for millennia.) That was good, but it cheapened Rector Doud's piety and made his religion a concoction to deceive people. Doud is to be a True Believer, a keeper of the Faith. So this is the evolution of those ideas.
Originally, I had no intention of having an apaxan presence on Mercator. But it does make sense that will be apparent when other stories unfold. But stories write themselves. I'm just transcribing them.
I knew that Emanuel was out there somewhere. Now I know where. Amazing how the story reveals itself to me.
Who's Emanuel? The clues are there. Think word evolution and abbreviation.
