Chapter 30 Viramunda

Viramunda goes door to door. She goes pillar to post. She warns, she warns, she warns. There are no doors left on earth, closed or open; if that old old curse still persists it is perhaps in the bleeding magnetosphere. There are no pillars either. The post still works; she checks her mail. She corresponds to, sometimes with, the witches of the red web, the wheel that is a galaxy, unaccountably human, vast beyond measure. But she has little time for them. They are far away, busybusy on their strange adventures. She's minding the old place all on her own, an eldest daughter trapped by duty to the ancestral home. She's busybusy too. She has a job to do. Viramunda hunts gods all day. As a grandmother once predicted, she has lived long enough to become very strange.

Time seems to move faster the longerlonger her memories stretch behind her, the red millions of years that she has navigated. It is confusing, often. Memory is heavy; the web is wearying. She yearns to put it down again, to swear off, to quit and be acquitted, to light only brief candles from now on, but she learned the hard way the dangers of forgetting. She remembers the names of birds; all the names she has worn like skins. She'll never forget that badbad marriage, because she's still dealing with its aftermath.

The children are wary of her, as they are right to be. She is a dread ancient grandmother, a bloody witch of the old ways. She shushes them, ushers them, shoos them off earth when she finds them still messing about.

—It's getting late, she tells them.—Don't you be hanging around this old haunted place. Fuck off into the sky before the old gods get you! Scat!

Viramunda has made the old gods her business ever since a dead god scraped poor Lambakanna out of the akashic record and wore him like a coat in a foul attempt to find its way back into the world—and nearly succeeded, still might win—all because she had cut herself down, made herself small. The insult alone is enraging. She, a witch of the old ways, lost a daughter to the gullet. No, she reminds herself; not lost; not yet, not yet. She has been alive and awake in this body for a hundred million years, give or take. Sooner or later, the god that took her daughter and her oldest friend will make his play for escape. Until then she will not rest, not sleep, not leavetake, not take leave, not take or leave, not give and take, not so much as blink. She tears off her eyelids and roars at the red sun until the sky bleeds.

She gave herself a new name: Viramunda, hero of earth. It's a joke, but not a funny haha. There's another joke under the first one—it's like that with her—because the name also means a healer of plague and a breaker of curses, and that's the work she's taken upon herself. That's the job. Her fury at herself has teeth; her skin flays itself off her body, abraded by rage, whenever she thinks her name. After all this time she has returned to her first and most terrible aspect, skinless and red.

She absorbed sister grandmother earth into herself long ago, after between them they reverse-engineered the gullet and understood the scam. The border between them became so seamless that she could soon not tell which of them was which. Self is porous, grandmother earth said, and our purpose is shared. Viramunda had agreed, and found herself holding a bone staff topped by a skull.

Over a hundred million years she has done to herself what the gods do to their prey, but in reverse: she has recovered herself from frayed ends. She has resurrected herself without dying. Her names, her lives, her memories, her uncountable connections to the wheel; she found these things in the akashic record, perfectly preserved. The fruit of herself, the selving she'd made in time; she plucked it and ate of it. She is selvage; she will not fray again. But her daughter, her brother, her other—

She walks the earth, hunting. When she's tired of walking, she gently lifts her human body in shaped gravitic currents, and she skims like a leaf over the water, both things that no longer exist on earth. What was once a biosphere is but a memory; little life is left on earth in these last days under the bloated red sun. What is left is dry as a bone, bleach and rust and dust and overreach. What could be saved or reconstituted of the biosphere has long since been rescued and taken far away. There are no ecosystems left, natural or constructed. Only some stray children playing in unsafe ruins, a few other old ones like herself on journeys of their own, and many desperate hungry gods, looking for prey before the end of their sentence, crowding the invisible earth.

Viramunda hunts gods with her spear, her skills honed over a hundred million years. Here, one rises from its hiding place, having finally threaded together stolen selves into an identity stable enough to slip past the forbiddings, to escape out into the galaxy. Here is a dead god digging itself out of the grave, rolling away the rock. The body it wears is insectiform, a fly—no, a wasp, crawling out of a fossilized nest somewhere near the bottom of the crust. The earth yawns open for it, a crack and a chasm, a cataclysm, all for this little insect almost invisible as it climbs up that long abyss. It is surprised when Viramunda appears between it and sky, and it makes the error of attempting to fight or intimidate, its body growing into a gigantic, monstrous echo of a wasp the size of an island, its enormous legs straddling the chasm it came out of, its wings so vast that the flutter raises storm winds.

If Viramunda was flying, she would have been buffeted and blown away. But she is not flying; she is there, a tiny speck in the air above the god, because she chooses to be there. When the god attempts to take to the air, she holds it down with the tip of her staff. It scrabbles ineffectually, causing earthquakes. It squirts a lake of venom and roars in triumph when her skin comes off, then roars again in terror and confusion. She tosses the staff up into space; it hurtles back down from orbit as a bone spear fifty kilometres long that pierces the wasp through and through, and keeps on going to prick the mantle at the bottom of the chasm far below. Lava spurts and pools and rises. The god wriggles and attempts to change form again, but cannot. The spear pins it in place at every degree of access, in every level of representation, every modality, every symbolic register, every visible and invisible world. The spear represents being pinned to earth. The spear is symbolic of the big no and the fuck you very much.

The rising lava devours the god's physical body, but the god begins to shriek only when it understands that the lava, or something representing its destroying heat, its molten flow, is present in invisible worlds. Viramunda waits until the shrieks stop, until the lava hardens, and then she examines the site forensically to make sure every trace of the god at every level of being is eradicated. Yet Viramunda is unsatisfied.

"If I could expunge you from the akashic record, I would," she tells the cooling pāhoehoe below. She speaks to them only once they're dead.

Four gods collaborate on simultaneous escape attempts at the four corners of the world, in the hope that Viramunda could not stop all of them at once. She is there for each and every one. She instantiates a dozen selves; four to deal with the gods, four to watch their backs, four more as a warning to the rest—she doesn't know what her upper limit is, but this is easy enough. She wants to drive it home in the forums of the invisible world that simultaneous mass breakouts don't work. It's been tried before, though four is a new record; the fact that these four tried their gambit anyway speaks to either a remarkably foolish optimism, sheer desperation, or perhaps ignorance. Collaboration is rare: gods are by their nature distrustful of each other, and with good reason. The invisible world often betrays gods trying to run the gullet to Viramunda, informants and traitors seeking to curry favour or attempting to bargain. She makes no deals. She hunts, she finds, she puts them down.

If gods don't hide well enough, if she finds trace evidence and tracks them down, she puts them down, too. If she so much as remembers a hint—why, the first sleeping god she put down was the one in that great rock that Fern showed her so long ago. The riverbed it had lain in was long gone, and the erstwhile boulder sunk deep and warped by seismic pressures, but the god was still within: a burning microscopic quantum of will at the heart of a fossilized leaf in the centre of a great igneous smear buried deep in the crust. She dug the rock out and turned her staff into a spear for the first time, a long needle so sharp and so narrow that she could slip it through the great empty spaces that constitute solid rock to put out that little light.

For gods, Viramunda is the pressure of unnatural selection. Because of her, escape attempts are now made mostly by gods with elaborate schemes like this last foursome, or like the last waspgod, those who have been in hiding so deep for so long they don't even know of her; they come out thinking they've won the game, run the gullet, and are now ready to ascend in triumph to free space.

Every time she hunts gods, she tests them; she scans them, their haecceity, their particularity, looking for herself, her otherself, and the parasitic other other nestled among them that will need to be plucked out like a tick. So far, they are strangers to her one and all, though always recognizable, always of a type, aren't they, their doings and deeds and decisions laid out in the crystalline perfection of the akashic record. The gods of this world are only those who were always the gods of this world in their afterlives and pastlives and manylives: its rulers and masters, the chief execs and the generals and the presidents and the ministers prime and non-prime and the directors of boards and the directors of events and the investors and the innovators and the job creators and the commanders in chief, the bringers of grief, the speechmaking warlords and award-winning warmongers, the slaveowners and the merchants of arms and the merchants of harms and the merchants of death and the merchants of flesh and sure and of course and not all sinners but only those who could afford the price, steep even in the late age of deep discounted upload, of bargain ascension to godhood; and even of those, onlyonly those who were early enough or blatant enough or briefly out of favour enough at the right time and place to be caught in the embrace of the forbiddings, that brief age of judgement before the diaspora went out and closed the doors of earth behind them. So many, so few, so very few.

Viramunda spears. The blasted desert earth can take the firestorms and the shock waves and the clouds of rising dust. This is not justice, though not injustice either. She has no illusions of righteousness. She is revenge, the last cold thing on earth.

By necessity her work takes her where they are; she spends more time in the invisible world than the visible one.

The invisible world has thinned. Once a storm of shrieking souls, now a silence. She blinks through the symbolic registers, slips through the veils and virtuals, the imaginaries of uncountable civilizations, the dreams of the deadworlds, the empty realms. It is not a silence of depopulation but the silence after an exodus from public spaces, of attempts to protect their privacy, to find closed doors to plot behind. The dynamic has been reversed. When Viramunda comes, the invisible world hides. Some, like her ultimate quarry, have proven extremely good at hiding, so good she sometimes wonders if they already escaped somehow, if the whole thing was just a nightmare. Perhaps she will open her eyes one day and see a mirrorface by candlelight, songs on a radio, the whole thing a long strange dream.

She enters dreams, too; they are just another kind of invisible world. She finds Aunty once in the deep past, meditating self-importantly, and tells her to watch the kids. It's useless, but she can't help but say something. So much begins. So much was already old. Alone in the dream, all ghosts and gods hiding from her, the devil dances slowly, laughing, her hips moving from side to side, her skull-topped staff keeping time.

There are some that will speak to her, in dingy byways and forgotten protocols. Her interlocutors, her confidential informants, little gods resigned to their fate. There are no material rewards she can offer them; freedom is not an option, and in everything else they are and were always wealthier than her. Her only currency in the immaterial world is attention and a rare gentleness; the chance to be listened to a last time, to be taken seriously, to be allowed briefly to pretend that they are still great powers, oligarchs and captains, visionaries and leaders of thought and nations. It is no small thing, for her to smile and pretend. It is humiliating that even after all this time there is no other way—and a reminder of how dangerous they still are, how fragile the forbiddings that contain them. For all that it is necessary, she rages against it, feels herself bled of vitality as if she were opening a vein, and the gods lap hungrily at this black blood, staining their chins. But in exchange, they snitch, they betray, they leak.

Viramunda follows the clues. She hunts, she hunts. A whisper leads her to a juicy archive. A name found there leads her to one who, when found and indulged and persuaded, becomes an informant. From them she learns of a secret location, a hidden retreat: a thimbleful of compacted computational substrate, so very small, anchored to this plane by a tendril of thirst only half as long as a human chromosome, tucked underneath a shadow at the bottom of what was once an oceanic trench. She suspects it is designed to hide behind an upwelling of lava if she is seen approaching in her wrathful aspect. Even armed with knowledge, she has to search for a long time to find it, so cleverly hidden it is at a right angle to conventional spacetime. She slips into the invisible world in disguise, using codes from her informant. In the invisible darkness she does all the little steps of the dance of authentication, until she turns a corner in the nothing and finds herself in a hidden city, a vast and shivering construction of white false-stone among snowy false-mountains underneath a flashing white sky, where white false-bodies flicker and flit and gossip in their false-heaven. Welcome to Just Desserts, an infographic packet tells her, the last resort! Here, safe from vigilantes and terrorists and no-good dirty rotten thieves, you can enjoy a pampered infinity of relaxation, of nothing but pleasures until the end of time. Please adjust your subjective timesense to one-gazillionth of Diaspora-standard. When she does, the flickering smoothes; the sky resolves into a thick blanket of peaceful, puffy, white false-clouds, mixing with fog and mist coming off quiet false-mountains.

She checks the guest list. There are forty-seven unique gods here, in five to seventy billion instantiations at any given point in the period that she observes, indulging in virtually every pleasure imaginable, the mundanities and perversions of a hundred thousand eras. Just Desserts is staffed by a lesser god captured and reprogrammed into servitude as a demon; the gods do so like to turn on each other. She makes herself unseen before she goes among them in those white rooms and halls, the raptures and orgies and performances. The gods are never not experiencing bliss; it is their greatest weakness. Given an inch, they spawn ever more instances of themselves, each given over to perfect and total pleasure, until forced to the material limit of overload. If not for the forbiddings, they say to each other, we could spread out from earth and convert all matter light and dark to computational substrate, and then there would be no need to ever stop, we could just keep going and going and going, and coming and coming and coming.

One of their favourite drugs is to share their memories of their great achievements during their mortal lives to be indulged in while they fill and flush themselves with pleasure, and Viramunda dips into these as she stalks unperceived past them; they are memories of great coups and conquests that are now treasured all the more for having been achieved with limited mortal capacities. Oh, how we bestrode the world, the gods sigh, rubbing and chittering at themselves. Oh, how great we were, how much greater we are now, how much greatergreater we could be, if we could just get out, if we could just get out.