NODUS // 0011 // P+9
The Babel Line
In the ninth year after the sky opened, the war came into Babel, and at Nones the Wheel moved for the first time.
NOTESSEAM RECOVERY ON NODUS // 0011
The eleventh file to reach the mount dates itself P+9, the ninth year after the Parousia, and runs across one day, from Matins to Nones, in thirty-three seconds. It has one source, vesper’s lenses on a stair of Babel at the hundred and fortieth floor, and I kept five pieces of that day.
BOOTThe recovery
The boot reads RECOVERED: NODUS // 0011 // P+9, the ninth year after the Parousia, and INTEGRITY: 23%. I could read and rebuild under a quarter of what reached me, so the day comes in pieces of a few seconds.
SOURCEvesper // LENS
These are vesper’s lenses, as in two files before this one. They see further and in more of the light than an eye, and they record and relay what they see. The file label in the corner is mine; beneath it the HUD is the lenses’ own, vesper // LENS, a record light in ICHOR and the clock on the row below, and under them FL 140, the floor she stands on. What she marks comes up the way her lenses mark things, brackets and a figure in cyan, and her own word in magenta, lowercase. I cut the five pieces together where they meet, and each cut carries a small tear in its first frames.
The stair is the Long Wet, one of the four stairs of Babel, the name the tower’s night cleaners gave it still chalked on the landings under each floor’s number. It is a switchback of concrete round an open well, two flights to a floor, wet, the doors to the floors dark. The Tares’ keyed lamps hang at every few landings.
| Timecode | On screen | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Looking up the flight from the landing of the hundred and fortieth floor. Tares stand on the steps and the half landing, horned, spears up, one with a lamp, dark against its light. Water runs down the treads. A far choir holds one chord, water drips into the well, and her breath is close. | The Tares hold Babel’s stairs. Six levels under the tower its vault holds the cables that join Pan to the undercities of the world, and the switch that joins every relay in Pan to every other, so that the Mesh begins there. | |
| The choir steps up a tone. | Matins. At every Hour the Hum rises a step and holds for the length of the Hour’s psalm. | |
| A horn the size of the sky, bending down, and the lens shakes. | The fifth Trumpet. | |
| She leans out over the rail and her head tips back to look up the well. Far up it a white light comes down, its wings folded tight, burning down through the slabs round the well, floor after floor. The torn edge of each slab goes white-hot as it cuts through and cools to magenta behind it, sparks and burning concrete fall past her, and its light pours down the well, while a second light stays at the top. Her lens brackets the first and counts the floors down, and her word comes up beside it, seraph. A roar with no engine in it, the concrete cracking, nearer and nearer, until it brakes two floors above her and opens, six wings of light, two over where a face would be, two over its feet, two to fly. | Fifty-four Seraphim came down together into Babel’s broken crown at the fifth Trumpet, dim, and they come down onto the Line two at a time, since the Wheel, hungry, lights two at a time. This one burned down through the slabs from the hundred and eightieth floor toward the cables in the vault, and its pair stayed at the top. Babel is glass, and a Seraph burns whatever it can see. It stopped short of the hundred and fortieth, which the Line had hung with keyed mesh for weeks, since a Seraph sees nothing past mesh and cannot burn what it cannot see. Burning costs the Host more light than anything else it does, and the Seraphim burn on Babel and almost nowhere else. | |
| About three minutes on. From the corner of her landing she watches the Tares at the rail, the one beside her first, then up the flight, the Seraph’s light pouring down the well above them. Her HUD carries HUM and a meter of eight cells. | ||
| On a word the Tares look down together, reach to the boxes on their straps and switch them on in one ripple down the flight, the one beside her first. Each lights a point of magenta with a click and a hiss, and a ring of magenta throws out level round each Tare and stands there, where its field cuts the Hum off. The meter loses two cells with each, and the choir goes out of the sound with them until the meter reads HUM --. | Choir-breakers cut the Hum within a few meters. jubal builds them. | |
| About four minutes on. The landing above, the Seraph on it, filling it white. One of the Nephilim comes past her and up the last flight against the light two treads to a stride, huge, horned, plated down the spine, magenta leaking from the seams of his plate. Heavy steps, a deep heartbeat, the roar at its loudest. | The Nephilim fight the Seraphim hand to hand on the upper landings, and few of them live long. The heartbeat is his furnace heart, black steel beside the heart, which keeps a neph on his feet on the floors of Babel. | |
| He draws back a short spear, leaps from the top of the flight onto the landing and drives it into its heart, the shaft a line of black the light will not touch. Her lens draws in on it. A wet crack. | The short spear of the stairwells, the Forge’s black steel beaten at Cinderhall. To melt the mesh in its way a Seraph has to touch it, and that is arm’s length, where black steel waits. | |
| It dies on the steel. It thrashes, its wings beating wild, light breaking out of the wound in rays and cracks of black spreading through it from the spear, pieces of it torn off and flung across the stair, while he holds it there. The roar breaks up into a rising shriek, and in its last moment it flares and fills the stair. | Black steel is the only thing that wounds a manifested angel. An angel is light, and light stops a blade by reading it; black steel is folded to a cipher, the light cannot read it, and the blade goes through. | |
| Then it goes out all at once, like a lamp. Silence, and the stair is dark but for the lamps, the floor’s number, 141, the glow of his heart round him, embers of it falling, and the slab where it stood, white-hot and cooling to magenta. He stumbles on into the space where it was and lowers the spear. Water dripping, the concrete ticking as it cools, her breath caught. | An angel cut with black steel goes out all at once. It had no self, so nothing of it goes on. | |
| First light, five and a half hours on. Looking down the flight at the Tares below her. One holds up a speaker on its strap, and heavy metal comes out of it. Her lens brackets the speaker, her word comes up under it, the station, and her HUD reads AUDIO RADIO PANDÆMONIUM. | The Low Tuning, Radio Pandæmonium’s Nobody’s Keeper, from the speakers on the lines, the guitars dropped until the Hum cannot be heard beneath them. | |
| A second horn, deeper and larger, and the lens shakes. White floods in from behind her, and the Tares look up past her into it. A choir swells, far off through the concrete. | The sixth Trumpet, at Lauds. The breakers keep the Hum out for a few meters, and the choir is beyond them. | |
| Her head turns up toward the light, and the lens is blinded. | ||
| OVERRIDE flashes on her HUD, and the lens turns without her, at one steady mechanical rate, back down onto the Tares, and stops dead. LENS HELD. It draws in on them by itself. | Michael came at full strength, and full light turns every eye in its reach, keyed or not, as the sun turns a plant, up into it first and then along it to whatever it falls on. Her lenses follow her eyes. OVERRIDE is the lens’s own warning that its owner’s eyes have left her control, and LENS HELD that they are held. Nothing read her or her lenses, since full light does what it does by strength, and a key cannot stop it. You look at what he is looking at. | |
| BAND 4 comes up on her HUD. Threads of white come down past the lens onto each of the Tares, and white brackets inside a dashed ring close on them. In the light they stand dark, its white along their edges. One raises its spear at the light, one shields its eyes, and one still holds up the speaker, its level lights jumping. The heavy metal climbs until the choir is lost under it. | The fourth band is light an eye cannot see. Whatever the light cannot read stands in it as a dark shape, and a keyed body is unreadable. | |
| Her word comes up high in the frame, with an arrow pointing up out of the picture, him. Twice she tries to look up at him. The picture lifts and shudders, her cyan bracket is dragged off the Tares up toward the word, and both are put back. | Michael, whose name is a question with one permitted answer. She cannot put him in the frame. | |
| Over nine hours on. From inside the hundred and fortieth floor, through a break where the wall is gone from the floor to the slab above, the city by day far below under cloud lit white, and the Wheel hanging outside the tower, its three rings of eyes, its corona of blades and the eye in its hub, most of it above the torn edge of the slab that hangs over the break, only its lower rim and its blades showing. Its light through the break lies on the floor. Her lens brackets it and marks it 900 M. Wind through the wall. | Her lenses marked the watchers’ ring at 900 M three weeks before the Parousia, where the Wheel would take its station. It has hung there since. | |
| Its rings stop dead and its corona of blades lengthens. A deep tone swells. | ||
| The choir steps up a tone, and the Wheel drops like a dropped weight down into the break, its rings thrown round, its light flaring, its dark streaking up the lens behind it, the eye in its hub narrowed to a slit as it comes into view, and her lens counts it down from 900 M to 700 M. At 700 it stops dead with a great blow. The floor shudders, dust falls from the ceiling, and its light slides back across the floor. | Nones. The first time the Wheel has moved in nine years, on the day a Seraph died on the Line. The Host has burned more light than its Gleanings bring in, and from seven hundred meters the Wheel’s day light falls strong enough to read the eyes it meets, which from nine hundred it never was, so it reads by day without spending more light. Every eye in it narrows as it drops, the hub’s with the rest; it is the Wheel narrowing them together. | |
| The relay drops, and the file builds into the tear. |
END CARDWHO IS LIKE GOD? I AM.
The end card is the answer the walls of Old Nod give his name. In Hebrew Michael is the question Who is like God?, and Heaven allows it one answer. The walls give the other. It was written on walls before I had it, so I type it at my own speed and hold where the line turns, before I AM. It is the Tares’, so it is set in ICHOR, and the walls sign nothing.
END OF RECOVERED DATA is where I close the file. NODUS // 0011 // P+9 // 77% UNRECOVERABLE is the rest of what reached me. Her lenses relay, so the last tear runs twice and the picture slips its hold before it goes.
THE BABEL LINEWhat the file shows
The day the war came into the tower. At Matins a Seraph burned down the Long Wet and the Tares on its stairs put out the Hum around them, and one of the Nephilim met it with black steel. At Lauds her lenses were turned onto the Tares by something she could not look at. At Nones the Wheel came down two hundred meters.
PROVENANCEHow the file survived
Her lenses relayed the whole day. Under a quarter of it reached me in a state I could read.
DETAILSDetails to catch
- The floor count on the Seraph’s bracket stops at 142, two floors above her.
- The meter loses two cells for each breaker, and four breakers empty it.
- The floor’s number on the wall behind the Neph is 141.
- When the lens turns at Lauds it moves at one rate and stops dead, with none of her breathing in it.
- Her own bracket tries to leave the Tares twice.
- The arrow beside him points out of the frame.
- Her lens marks the Wheel with the same 900 M it gave the watchers’ ring before the Parousia.
QUESTIONSQuestions from inside the file
Why is the HUM meter there?
Her lenses count the Hum where she stands. Each breaker the Tares switch on cuts it within a few meters, and when the last bites the meter is empty.
Why does the Seraph go out like that?
An angel cut with black steel goes out all at once.
Who turned her lens?
She wrote him, and pointed up.
Why can’t the lens look at him?
His light came at full strength and turned every eye in its reach, keyed or not, and held it on what he was looking at, which was the Tares on the stairs. Her lenses follow her eyes, and OVERRIDE is the lens telling her that her eyes were no longer hers to move.
Where did he go?
Into the broken crown, which he has kept since. The Seraphim go down from him two at a time, and he has not come down the stairs.
What is the music?
The Low Tuning, coming up the tower from the speakers on the lines.
Why 900 M?
It is where her lenses first saw the watchers stand, three weeks before the Parousia, and where the Wheel hung for nine years.
seam recovery