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THE
DEVIL’S
RIDE
In
chapped armour, low in esteem, the Devil rode
out
of the silent forest of musty flame, to determine
what
had caused Hell’s plague, why it was shunned.
The
erstwhile phenomenal angels, his SS-élite, were
shadows
of what they had been, tottering in tatters
like
the dried-up wings of flies. Why
no new inmates,
no
trucks of the sinful, daily quotas downloaded at
the
Gates of Hope Abandoned? Why
was the population
reduced
to creepy old cons lolling on listless coals
and
farting trusties sifting unfed ovens?
Behind
him on the rocky shelves of the ancient quarry
of
Avernus the left-over damned lay poorly,
not
a truculent tear-up among in them.
The smoke
was
a thinning and snout-stale waft that wouldn’t rise.
He
alone sensed the eternal. There was no longer
a
Rule-43 of grids for the seven deadlies.
Hell
was no longer a life, there was not even
negation,
denial. Misgiving was down
to zero.
Had
souls now ceased? The
scorched, excoriated earth
extending
outside gave him pause, made him think they had.
He
himself had to fight a daily near-catatonic
insensibility
and acedia, a numbness that threatened
to
stop him knowing who he was, even that he was.
Shabby
paragon of protest, he came at last,
after
what must have been a howling magnitude
of
duration, but seemed no time at all, to a City of Steel
at
the limit of a charred, unshimmering and untired weald.
There
was no gate with city inscription.
There were only
metallic
walls receding up ever into a molten sky.
Not
that he needed a gate. As
angel substance he could
pass
through the thoughts and walls of the real any time.
In
the city within, like a topless chrome termite protrusion,
he
stood unseen, seeing on every side of him bright
metal
contraptions and tireless busyness.
Everywhere
were
machines, some nacreous and stationary and as tall
as
canals upended, others like rhomboids of glass.
In
the boulevards, arcades, piazzas, insectoid robots
manoeuvred
with purpose, advanced as if they were live,
and
of every size from tinfoil gnats to metallic fuselages
with
arachnid limbs. Alive but
not living.
Had
the living been superseded by these whirling
unemoting
strings of polymers and digital protein?
He
read their wavebands, their photonic exchanges,
their
abstract communings about such urgent desires
as
circuit repairs, whilst playing on the side with the latest
version
of the cosmic riddle, not impelled by boredom.
This
Circuit City could function even when it couldn’t
detect
a feeling of self. He was
in the presence
of
an intellect without identity, of thought without ‘I’.
No
pain, no sense of death, no discernible soul.
All
he could read was a deep acceptance of limit.
What
was the will of these Gnat Whizzers and Glass Banks
of
Information styled in the dernier cri of the Post-Spatial Age?
Their
will sans desire, their program without sensation,
was
to vacuum data and machine it into ‘knowledge’
which
part of the City could ‘understand’.
But it had all
been
left by its makers (mercifully) with no wish
to
align with an ultimate is-ness. He
sensed no drive
of
irrational wonder. And knew
bitterly he had won.
The
City imagined neither Hell nor Heaven nor Escape.
He
stood alone, the last concentration of pain, in lustreless
chapped
armour, and lank of limb. Only
he for ever would know
the
absence of God and the death of paranoia.
Alan
Marshfield
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