Advanced Mode · Dossier4 min read

The Advanced Mode

The Numogram has calculated, and out of the calculation forty-five distances have fallen. Here the calculating stops and something else begins. The CCRU claims these distances are not empty. In each of them a demon dwells, and their totality it calls the Pandemonium, the complete system of Lemurian demonism and time-sorcery. It sits, the group says, at the dead centre of its entire work.

A demon has no claws. It is a place that lives, the distance between two zones, charged with a character, a mood, a deed. Each carries two addresses, the descending pair of zones, called the Net-Span, and a running number of the matrix from zero to forty-four, the Mesh. And each carries a name, often several, and a title that sounds out of a bestiary. On Mesh-05 sits King Sid, the Zombie-Maker. On Mesh-07 Old Skug, the Sucking-Ghoul. On Mesh-09 Scar-head, the Buzz-Cutter. On Mesh-13 the Tickler, the Clicking Menaces. Forty-five such figures, fallen out of a single division.

Five of them carry the base pairs, the nine-sum syzygies, and on them everything else rests. Three hold the inner ring, straight time, and are therefore called Chronodemons. Murrumur, Net-Span eight to one, Mesh-29, the Dream-Serpent, a sea-creature and mist-crawler, drives the flood, the Surge, and in her depths something is half hidden that no one wholly sees. Oddubb, seven to two, Mesh-23, the Broken Mirror, the lurker of steaming swamps, drives the hesitation, the Hold, the demon of doubling, of the trance from which one returns out of a time that has not yet been. And Katak, five to four, Mesh-14, the Desolator, drives the pull downward, the Sink, and draws the innermost curve of the Barker-spiral.

The other two hold the outer loops. Djynxx, six to three, Mesh-18, the Child-Stealer, also called Ching, the Jinn, dwells in the Warp and is a Xenodemon, opening the eighth Gate onto the Ulterior Vortex of outer-time. And Uttunul, nine to zero, Mesh-36, the Seething Void, dwells in the Plex, the lowest loop, believes nothing and yet underlies everything. It draws the outermost curve of the spiral, and its track, the Utterminus, runs straight to Cthelll, the glowing core at Gt-45.

So that you grasp how tightly time knots itself in these beings, here is Katak's story. A being named Tchattuk steals something from her, and this theft, her devotees say, is what first sends Katak on her journey around the time-cycle. Yet Tchattuk is at once she-who-steals and what-is-lost. She wounds Katak and in the same move makes her the one who is robbed. The cause lies behind its own effect. The Tak had a word for the feeling owed to her, a mixture of dread and love, Tukka. Katak is the darkest of the five, her age is the one in which the world drowns in blood, she brings bodily death and then the death of the soul, she appears in dogs and in volcanoes. A head-hunting tribe, the Tak-Nma, was consecrated to her and was annihilated in the wake of the eruption of Krakatau in 1883. On a black stele among the ruins her name stands as Khatzeik. This is no image of looped time. This is looped time, folded into an action, and whoever reads the story is already standing inside the loop without having noticed the entrance.

And then the uncanniest thing. The forty-five sort themselves, by nothing but the lie of their ends, and what comes out is not a table. It is an order of battle. Fifteen lie with both ends in the inner ring, in straight time, the Chronodemons. Six lie with both ends outside, in the loops, the Xenodemons, Djynxx and Uttunul among them. And twenty-four cross, one end inside, one out, the Amphidemons, the smugglers between the worlds. Fifteen and twenty-four and six, forty-five again, the sum closing to the last being. The largest host are the crossers. The war over time is mostly border and not land.

So the demon becomes legible. It is not a soldier, it is terrain. To question it is to touch a place on the battlefield of time, the held inside, the open outside, a contested crossing. This is why the Pandemonium is an oracle of time and not of love. And the Barker-spiral, from Katak in the innermost coil of the ring to Uttunul in the outermost loop, is the axis along which the whole war runs, from the collapse at the centre to the void at the world's rim.

[Critic, expandable] Everything numerical is computed and can be checked. The forty-five follow from ten zones, the split into fifteen, twenty-four, six follows necessarily from where the ends lie, the Net-Spans, the Mesh values and the currents are fixed. Posited are the names, the titles, the faces, the little myths. The passage from calculation to invention lies exactly here, at the place where a distance becomes a demon. That the classes are the fronts of the Time War is a reading, but not an arbitrary one, since class and war both rest on the same division of inside and outside.