The Holocaust Piano
by Phaedra7veils
Chapter 13: Pax Romana
For a moment, Katze wondered if he was stuck in another Psychetech illusion, or the ultimate Psychetech illusion.
"Raoul, our planet is dying. We're on the verge of our own extinction and you're planning military conquests?"
"It's necessary, you see," Raoul cut him off. "Amoi was never meant to support life. There isn't enough water to keep the atmosphere stable. Our birth rate is about five to eight males for every female, and most of the women are barren."
"So you've decided that we will achieve stability by attacking the two most powerful forces in our planetary system?"
"We cannot survive without the resources that the Federation provides, and yet, the only commodity we can offer for sale is slaves — and the biotechnology which creates them."
"They will wipe us out."
"We're dying anyway."
Okay, so Raoul wasn't insane after all. He was just preoccupied with the problems of trying to keep a planet fit for human habitation. Still, "This may well be, Raoul, but don't you think there are more pressing concerns right now? Like the fact that the Priestess Cult is trying to take us over and the Apheliotrophs are–" he hesitated, "in revolt?"
"Ah, so Zazen has finally declared himself, has he?" Raoul stirred the particulants again and after the swirl settled, the three-dimensional image of Amoi, its twin moons and the Percks Asteroid Belt came into focus.
Something about the twin moons drew Katze's attention. It was the sound of ocean breakers, the strange phenomena that he caught while they were on the Von moon surface.
Raoul began walking toward the entrance of his suite at Eos Tower.
"You knew?" Katze felt strangely disoriented as they proceeded through the apartment. There were no signs of invasion anywhere. The floor tiles were intact. Sun shone through the windows. Furniture had not been overturned and tossed helter skelter. The door was a true door and not a mass of fibres swaying like the tentacles of a silky jellyfish.
"Not precisely." Raoul strode through the door and onto the elevator.
"You suspected?" Katze rephrased his question in hope of a clearer answer.
"No," Raoul said. "Not about that."
The security check systems were not functioning. There were no iris-scans necessary for activating the elevator or opening any of the doors. These differences from the past workings of Eos Tower made something clear to Katze: within the black shielded space which was the interface melded with the Holocaust Piano, there was an enormous amount of illusion in place. He had to fight with the liquid quality of the air to bring his consciousness back, not so much to the present, since this particular place didn't seem to share the same time-space continuity as Tanagura or Amoi, but he couldn't know for certain, but just to sharpness and focus. He kept wanting to sink into a cozy sort of haze, like a drugged pet. Katze didn't know how much of Amoi's situation was real or fabricated by Psychetech weaponry.
He was idly curious about how far the illusions of the interface settled. As they walked out onto the Mezzanine level of the tower and all the golden glory that was Eos and its nearest outlying communities spread under their eyes like veins of rich minerals, he decided that it probably extended to all of Tanagura, if not all of Amoi.
Raoul led him to the underground transportation chutes that connected the Underworld with Eos. There were neither Apheliotrophs, nor cyborgs to be seen anywhere. Their absence made Katze very edgy. He expected them to jump out like a troop of Onyx police officers ready for a cut of action on the black market.
"Guardianship over the Underworld has its own incumbent perils. What Iason and I suspected was that Lau had resorted to cyberfusion after his lifespan exceeded the usual rate by several weeks. We took a calculated risk in anticipation that Jupiter might–" Raoul reconsidered his words. "A cyberfused race of humans seemed preferable to a race of only androids and no humans at all. We were curious to see how much of his humanity he would retain."
"I see," Katze said, even though he didn't. He fumbled and patted around the uniform that Paviter had lent him for a pack of cigarettes, in hopes that the habit would reconnect him to his senses more accurately. There were none to be found.
"Not to worry," Raoul smirked, a sight which shocked his companion to the quick. "He's still mostly human."
"It doesn't bother you that he has staged this coup d'état?"
"Not really."
This was so unlike Raoul, or any other Blondie, that Katze had the crawly sensation that this wasn't him. Even so, when Raoul opened the door to the transport pod, Katze climbed in right beside him. As though he read Katze's thoughts, Raoul laughed, "There are always small problems and obstacles."
"Small!"
"This is only one of many things which we will have to deal with at the appropriate time. Right now, it is of less concern to me that Lau is running Tanagura than the question of how the Apheliotrophs managed to avoid MORT."
"Yes, I wondered about that, too," Katze's forehead wrinkled. "Absolutely everything has been invaded with these strange spider webs, because everything was tied into Jupiter. So how could Lau's army escape from that? Not even the pure androids were able to get away. I suppose that's because of the human element fused together with the cyborgs, right?"
The transport pod took off with a flash, everything visual outside of it dissolving into lines.
Raoul glanced at Katze. "I'm sorry, what did you ask?"
"The cyber-fusion with humans, that's the only thing which makes Apheliotrophs different than the androids or Jupiter, isn't it? And besides, they didn't interfere with the MORT virus or the Tenebrian Priestess Cult because the Tenebrians weren't interfering with their schemes and strategies."
"Is that so? And who told you this?"
"Erm—Lau."
Raoul reached over and ruffled his hair like he was a little boy. "I suspect that the Apheliotrophs were more intimately connected with Jupiter than any of us can imagine."
A strange shiver crept up Katze's spine.
"Do you mean to say–?"
"The first thing that struck me as strange as the planetary systems began to shut down was that an intelligence of Jupiter's magnitude had not anticipated an attack from Off World. How was that possible? Consider the odds, and it isn't. So, given that Jupiter must've made a backup, what form would it take?"
"You aren't saying that Jupiter's consciousness resides within those–those things, are you?"
"Mm, simple process of elimination, really. In the end, what was the last artificial life-form left standing?"
Katze gaped.
"It's probably not the full intelligence. It's something nascent perhaps, like a seed or a fragment of a holograph."
Katze considered, "Which would be the full intelligence."
"In embryonic form, yes."
It took a minute or two for Katze to absorb this new information, or reel inwardly in shock at it.
So the Tenebrians had already infiltrated Amoi ages ago, with Jupiter's tacit knowledge and cooperation, or so, Katze figured, it appeared to Raoul.
"Er, where are we going?" He suddenly thought to ask.
"Jupiter's Tower."
"Oh. Why?"
"Because it's only while we're under the protection of the Holocaust Piano interface that we can move on the Priestesses of Tenebrios with impunity."
"We're going to–what?" Katze started to feel panicky. "Are you sure about that? You don't seem–"
He sealed his lips. Raoul turned to face him. Katze didn't know how to put his words across in a way that wouldn't offend the Blondie. Nor could he think of a way to say what he needed to say with tact. "You don't seem quite in your right mind."
Instead of reacting in the usual Blondie fashion, Raoul laughed. Katze knew at that moment that Raoul was definitely not in his right mind.
"Even so." The transportation pod slowed to a halt. The doors unsealed and lifted like gull wings. Raoul stepped out, and offered a hand to Katze. "Shall we continue?"
"What are you planning on doing here, Raoul?" The smaller man wasn't sure if he wanted to be part of this.
"It's alright, my pet. Don't you trust me by now?"
Trust the man who tried to leave him behind on the Von moon? Katze thought that one through a little further: tried to leave him behind on the Von moon because he didn't want Katze to get hurt. Because he cared enough to assume some parental-style control, not that Katze appreciated it. But Katze had chosen to circumvent that control and returned to Amoi and Raoul, no matter what the danger. He wasn't about to second-guess that decision now.
"Trust has nothing to do with it," Katze put his hand in Raoul's and was pulled from the car.
The apparent emptiness and harmlessness of Jupiter's tower did nothing to put the former Furniture at ease. Katze knew that the lower chambers of the tower were supposedly flooded with Benzine and other gasses and that Raoul had not vented them because of the danger to the Amoian atmosphere. Yet, neither he nor Raoul were affected by any poisonous gas as they walked through the spacious, brightly lit corridors. Unobstructed, they took the elevator up and continued through the antechamber to Jupiter's hall. Raoul threw the doors to her meeting room open wide.
Katze saw a strange sculptural figure standing in the midst of an energy field which looked like an old-fashioned Tesslar globe. Electrical charges shot in and out of the statue like lightning sent and received.
"Alike, but different," Raoul murmured.
"How so?"
"Jupiter is surrounded by gold and white light. Now that it has been possessed by a Priestess, there is darkness instead."
Katze looked at the figure. There seemed to be a face, but it was swallowed in blackness, just like the place in Raoul's penthouse where the Holocaust Piano once sat. The entire figure seemed to swallow light. Wherever it moved, the room seemed dim.
"You must remain here, Katze," Raoul explained.
He had said nothing about keeping the doors closed, so Katze stood just shy of the hall and watched as the Blondie moved forward and sat in a chair, next to a small table. A wine-glass and an opened bottle of wine materialized in front of him, but he did not take it. Then the room seemed to hum with electro-magnetic waves as the crackles of electricity flickered and vibrated.
Every once in awhile, Raoul would respond but the conversation was one-sided to Katze's senses.
"... We face something similar. It is the conditions of our planet which have created our imbalance, not the will of the individuals on it, although it may be that the Artificial Intelligence which ruled us may have amplified the situation."
"... I considered military strikes against the major ruling authorities in our planetary system in order to stabilize the Amoian atmosphere. We are in especially short supply of water. We cannot continue to negotiate the purchase of water with slaves. Our survival depends upon keeping what human life we have on the planet surface itself. There is a shortage of the essential materials which generate life. We cannot continue to grow it and send it off-planet."
"... Our planet was in imminent danger, so this seemed the only course of action left to us. It was not our intention to destabilize the outworld sector. Nor was that consideration going to stop us. For us, it was a matter of need outweighing risk against eventual consequences."
"... Yes, we are open to alternatives. We prefer them."
"... If you were to vacate the Tower, the Artificial Intelligence which ruled us will undoubtedly re-enter."
"... Yes, the one know as Jupiter. Currently, it resides within the army of cyber-human fusions called the Apheliotrophs under the leadership of the Second Blondie, Zazen Lau, who is also one of them. They have staged a coup d'état, centered within my penthouse suite at Eos Tower, and I have no authority over them."
"... You are certainly welcome to try. Jupiter has never been open to negotiation and truce. It runs according to its will and may only concede as a strategical maneuver, in order to win control later. I believe negotiation would be futile. Yet Amoi will certainly perish if the functional aspects of that Artificial Intelligence are not restored. It governs everything from the cleansing of the atmosphere to the regeneration of cellular life. It is the repository for the cultural and historical memories of human existence prior to settling within the Outworld sector."
Katze found the remaining conversation too disjointed and difficult to follow. It seemed that Raoul and the statue with the Tenebrian Priestess came to some sort of resolution, because he rose to his feet and shook her hand. But as he left her presence, the expression on his face was dark and threatening. Katze decided not to ask until they were back in the transportation pod and on their way to Eos Tower. Even then, Raoul refused to discuss it.
The thought that Jupiter had chosen the time of the Tenebrian attack to launch the next phase of human subjugation left Katze sick at heart.
"Why did Jupiter concern itself with us at all if we're not necessary for its survival?" he asked, his voice bleak and his eyes dulled. "If it considers us such a hindrance, why not send us to other planets and close the place off from human habitation? Why tie us to this place by fusing us with its machinery?"
Raoul stared long and hard at Katze before coming to the apparent decision that his questions weren't rhetorical. "We have something it doesn't have, something it has decided it needs."
Katze was thinking in general terms, like life, feelings, heart, stuff like that.
"Our ancestral memories of Earth," Raoul put a stop to those thoughts. "They are the very foundation of our minds. Jupiter was a respository for memories of Earth implanted by the first settlers, but its memories are subjective. The collective memory is not. It is an actual recording of what happened from the human perspective from the dawn of our birth. I suspect that is the real reason why the Tenebrians are allowed to be here, why they were permitted to implant MORT: in order to tap into the source of our shared memories. Jupiter couldn't do this alone. Jupiter is too akin to our consciousness. It required a different type of intelligence, something alien to Jupiter, preferably something which had no idea that it was being used."
Katze had no idea what Raoul was talking about.
"Look, don't you remember the dream you had back when the Psychetech interference first began? — Your dream of Ceres in its harvest aspect?"
Katze vaguely remembered the dream. It felt so long ago.
"I asked you then how was it possible for you to have such a vision when you've never experienced anything like it before. Haven't you thought about that since?"
Something about Raoul's question struck Katze in a peculiar fashion. His mind flickered back to Hilarion's library and the entries he had read on poetry, flowers and their perfume. What struck him about the dream of Ceres was how much it was like poetry, how it spoke to a different part of his mind than his usual thoughts. He supposed this was connected to what Raoul was talking about.
"The only thing that all human beings share is our ancestral origin on Earth," Raoul explained further.
Something else troubled Katze.
"Raoul, when you entered the Holocaust Piano interface, what happened to Paviter, or Tibór, or the Novaterran woman you met on Von? Did Lau capture them?"
Raoul considered. "It's possible, but unlikely."
"Where are they?"
"I believe before I was linked to the interface, they spoke of departing for Jupiter's Tower, but I'm sure that it didn't happen. At least, I'm sure that the former Priestess, the one whom you called "Novaterran", was not part of that expedition."
Former Priestess! Katze was gobsmacked. "If she's not with them, with Paviter and Tibór, where is she?"
Raoul snorted. "It is more of a question of where are we? We, you and I, dear Katze, are in her."
"In her!"
"That's right," Raoul looked at him, amusement lighting his face. "In order to interface with through the Holocaust Piano, we had to enter through her mind."
"But – but – how–?"
"It's alright," Raoul patted his shoulder. "You don't have to understand fully."
"How is this safe?"
"Safe? I don't know that it is. I do know that women have a difficult time surviving on the planet of Amoi. So there is only a certain amount of time any of the Priestesses can abide here before they are forced to take their leave."
"A built-in expiry date?"
"That's right."
Not until they had returned to his suite did Raoul speak about the aspect of his meeting with the Priestess in Jupiter's Tower which had enraged him.
"There is no way we can survive without a steady external supplier. Our seas are too shallow. Our atmosphere is too thin. We will die out within the year." Raoul was about to drop his fists on top of the Holocaust Piano with the same old frustration, but held himself back just in time. He remembered the profoundly negative effects this had in the past. Instead, he paced.
It troubled Katze that Raoul was trapped by this thought. The Blondie seemed to believe it was possible to save Amoi by going to war with forces with more strength and resources and numbers than their planet could ever produce let alone sustain. Moreover, that it was possible to do this with a force of cyber-human hybrids that held the vestiges of an artificial intelligence hostile to human life, one that sought to alter humans beyond their human form, and through the process of these changes, eliminate their humanity. Raoul seemed to believe it was possible to pull Lau and the Apheliotrophs back under his command.
A small dark thought appeared in Katze's mind. The effects of it produced a physical reaction in his body, causing the surface of his skin to contract like shivering, or like being caught by the electrical shock of his pet-ring. What if Raoul was caught in one of these Psychetech desire webs that he had read about back in Hilarion's library? What if his attention and focus was drawn to this mad idea of conquest because the Tenebrian Priestess who seemed to be in control of Jupiter's Tower had read his desire to improve Amoi and was manipulating it?
"There has to be another way," Katze burst out. A new idea flashed into his mind. "There is another way."
Raoul stopped in mid-stride. His back straightened. Katze's words seemed to cause tremors in the atmosphere, ripples which lessened the cloying heaviness of the air. It became less gluey, less thick. At the same time, it felt as though he was lighter, as though the pull of gravity on his body had grown less powerful.
Raoul turned to Katze. "If you have a better suggestion, I'm open to hearing it."
Katze swallowed hard. He had no plan. He didn't even know where to start creating a plan, but anything that formed in the objective part of his consciousness would be subjected to attacks from the Tenebrian Cult anyway. He couldn't depend on his sense of reason. He couldn't trust his own rationality. Raoul had spoken of primordial memories, aspects of the mind which existed outside of his ordinary consciousness. So these extensions of the mind were possible. His thoughts flew through the images of his recent past, back to Hilarion's library which was like the physical representation of memory itself. He considered the way the stories of flowers and poetry which he had scanned had affected him. How they made things appear in his mind that were not related to the words or the book, but were random connections that eventually joined into a cohesive whole.
He thought of the painting of the Solar Flare and how the charged magnetic particulants moved, and the image of Amoi and its two moons that swam out of those curtains of light. Amoi and Von and the second moon which had created that strange phenomenon of sound traveling through space, the sound of ocean breakers, the sound of water. Amoi needed water to stabilize its environment, to complete the terraforming project that its group of scientists began before Jupiter turned strange. It needed water and Raoul was about to launch a suicidal invasion for ...
"The second moon is made of frozen water," Katze said, walking over to the painting, reaching his hand into the magnetic particulants and giving them another swirl. They heaved and roiled, and slowly coalesced into a globe, the three-dimensional image of the second moon.
Startled, Raoul moved closer. He stared at the image of the asteroid, the distinctive colour and texture.
It was clearly covered with a substantial amount of ice.
"How did you know?" he shot back a look toward Katze, filled with surprise, wonder, and admiration.
"I just used a different part of my mind," Katze shook his head, "and to tell you the truth I don't know. It all has to be confirmed. It could just be a–"
Raoul cut off the stream of his words with a wave of his hand, as though through his doubts were enough to change the possible reality of it to an illusion. "Jupiter blocked us from exploring or setting up colonies on the surface of the second moon, or even from sending geophysicists to take core samples. We were never provided with reasons."
"That still doesn't prove anything," Katze continued to argue. "To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where I got the idea that the moon was covered with ice. I don't know."
He couldn't trust the thought. He couldn't trust the way it had appeared to him.
Raoul continued to play with the Magnetic Particulant painting.
"Then tell me how the thought occurred to you," he swirled the moon around and around, examining it from every angle.
Katze scratched his head. He described the sounds of ocean breakers on Von, and how his appreciation of poetry and the natural experiences described in the books from Hilarion's library gave him this wild idea about a different way of "knowing" something, as well as what Raoul had described about collective memories, and how he was so desperate for ideas of how not to go to war that, "basically, I was clutching at straws. I grabbed the idea out of the blue."
"Out of the blue?" Raoul looked at the painting again. The moon shone with a silvery blue light, the colour of water. Magnetic Particulant paintings were said to be so sensitive that shifts in a person's thoughts would be reflected within the imagery somehow, not necessarily with an exact visual replica.
"There are other problems with Amoi besides the shallowness of our oceans and atmosphere," he told Katze. "Very few women can survive or bear children here."
Katze figured as much.
"Just as very few men can survive the atmosphere of Tenebrios."
"Then why are they trying to take us over?" Katze asked.
"The Priestesses use a different type of consciousness. Reason has nothing to do with it. Do you remember our discussion about Coelescent Telepathy?"
It was too long ago. The details were lost. Katze shook his head.
"One of the side-effects is problems with spatial-temporal alignment."
"Which means?"
"They confuse the future with the past, except that the past no longer exists and the future hasn't been created yet, so it can be "re-created" differently at any point. The difficulty with that type of consciousness is its capacity for delusion. The Tenebrian at Jupiter's Tower seemed to believe that Amoi's attempted conquests of Novaterra and the Federation threw our Outworld system into such disarray that Tenebrios was sealed off and doomed. It's invasion of Amoi was an attempt to pre-empt that possibility." Raoul reached out and placed his hand on Katze's shoulder, "which brings us back to your idea about mining the second moon for water."
Katze stammered, "My idea didn't quite get that far but, yes, that would be the logical step if the moon should prove to have water. But what about my different type of consciousness? I don't understand. I don't follow."
"We rely on reason because it is the only accurate way of determining what is real in the moment with what we can perceive and objectify with our senses. There are other forms of intelligence, which may be subject to delusion, but that doesn't mean they are less valuable."
"So what are you saying?"
"I think we have to confirm whether your suspicion holds true about the composition of the second moon. We have to prove it one way or another."
Katze blinked. "So, what do we do?"
Raoul looked around, "We have to find our way out of the interface."
"Okay, how do we do that?"
"I don't know."
The Holocaust Piano – chapter 12 << >> The Holocaust Piano – chapter 14