The Iron tower: By Michael Cho

Hark surveyed the infinite vista of cracked mud from a towering castle of rusting iron. From the highest tower, he could just glimpse a hint of green beyond the plains of death. The Beautiful One, who had not been there, suddenly was at his side.

"Life is hard to extinguish," He whispered. "Look, with what persistence it creeps from the cracks!"

Hark watched with eyes effaced by the horrors, if not the wisdom, of the millenia. Green crept from gray dust.

He summoned a chariot of bone, with twelve coal-hued horses-nightmares-and wheels that flashed razor death, and rode over the dusty plain to beyond the horizon. The power of his sight enabled him far greater range than the limitations imposed by the planet's curvature would suggest. The verdure was, in fact, far beyond the horizon of man, on another continent, in another time. The surprise of seeing it forced him to leave the castle of iron for the first time in a thousand circuits of the planet around the sun.

It took him a day or a week or a year to reach what he had seen. By the time he arrived, when his ghastly chariot, with its horrid train, was brought to heel, the tincture had grown from a single green cell to a vast forest. Trees as massive as geological objects climbed ponderously to the sky like ancient towers seeking divinity. A cacaphony assaulted his ears, which had known silence for so long. Brachiating animals, shaped like small, furry men, ignored him and his magnificient transport. Flying beasts covered with iridescent feathers that split sunrays into rainbows spread their wings and fell horizontally, as ponderous as the trees. Tiny, seven-legged organisms buzzed, creeped, and beeped; none of them, however, daring to touch his person.

His boots pressed into decaying leaves atop moist earth. The forest grew thick in every direction, and only the intercession of busy, whirring white minions allowed him to pass. After a spell of tedious wandering, he reached a peaceful grotto crossed by a sweetly gurgling stream. Darting, cold-blooded creatures that could change the color of their skins flitted sharply through the water, looking for food. The food was algae. Each time complex life began, certain things remained consistent. Green things occured. Unicellular organisms flourished overwhelmingly if invisibly. Sentience seemed to be inevitable. These common design concepts, as he could not help but think of them, never failed to occur.

Hark stepped over the stream and continued on his journey. He pushed aside a thick, sticky vine his servants had failed to clear, ran into an animal trail, and saw a strangely scarred piece of rock. It was flint, roughly chiseled and flattened along a multitude of fault lines into an unmistakably functional shape. He held it between two fingers and cut a line across his palm. Blood welled up in the crevice in his hand and fell to the ground in steady drops. As the animals had timeless design principles, so did the tools of the animals. Except whatever had made a tool could no longer rightly be called an animal.

With a quicker step, he followed the animal trail. He knew and did not know where he walked. His instincts could not fail him, and neither could his senses, but he preferred now to allow the new life to reveal itself to him. Hark had not lived all these years without boredom. In fact, he had played out this very scene so many times that it was not without its own brand of tiresomeness. But it was different this time. Contrary to what the Beautiful One had sarcastically intoned, Hark had thought life thoroughly extinguished. Being incorrect was interesting, as well as annoying.

At last, he reached an enclave of the new creatures. They were warm-blooded, bipedal, large-headed-actually, anthropoid. Superficially, they were very much like the primates of eons past, although he could tell at a glance a million ways they differed. But they were sentient and that was really the only thing that mattered. Surprisingly, their smooth skin was pale green, infused with an analogue to chlorophyll.

Hark decided to allow one of the men to approach him. He contrived for only one to be so priviledged. It stumbled and walked with a curious, scampering, somewhat reptilian locomotion. When he became visible to the man, it stared at him for a long time with its mouth wide open. It saw, he assumed, an endlessly complicated creature formed not completely unlike itself.

"Are you God?" asked the man. It spoke with tiny ventricles and flaps on the side of its long neck, through air pressure. Tight collars would never become the fashion in its race's future.

Normally, boredom erupted within him whenever he heard the question. Never had he favored a questioner with the true answer, or at least the answer he thought to be true. And the question still bored him.

"What do you think?"

The man answered, "I do not know."

"Yet you wish to know."

The man bowed low, touched its palms to the leaf-strewn ground. "Of course."

"You might do better to ask if I am really here. I may be your mind's invention."

"If you will not answer that," said the man, "then answer me this: Why was I born?"

"You were born to procreate."

"And only to spawn, then? There is nothing more?" The symmetrical flaps lining the man's neck quivered spasmodically.

"You were born with a nagular gland, were you not?" asked Hark.

It pondered. A translucent, nictitating membrane momentarily hid its eyes. "Yes, of course. With the nagular, I can duplicate myself. But am I only a walking nagular? I have eyes and talking flaps and lungs and hands, yes? For the eyes, I was born to see, the flaps to speak, the lungs to breathe, the hands to grasp."

It thought, it tried to abstract. "I was born to exist, then."

Hark let the thought dangle. "Are you unsatisfied?"

"Yes."

"Maybe that is the doom of all men who examine themselves," said Hark.

"I would rather know all the dark secrets of the universe, than live as they do," said the man bitterly. He referred to those of his kindred engaged in a highly competitive sport, consisting of standing stock still in the stream, then catching the camoflauged fish with their hands.

"Be careful what you wish for," said Hark. He watched the man walk back to his village. It was uncertain of what had just happened. Perhaps, it would tell stories of a fantastic, scintillating being that shared higher wisdoms. Or maybe not.

Hark decided to return to his iron castle. He boarded the bone chariot, and without a word being spoken, the horses pulled mightily. The chariot smashed through centuries-old trees, and the bladed wheels sliced several unlucky animals to ribbons. As he rode, wind coursing through his hair and inflating his robe, he pondered the old questions yet again. Nothing was different, but everything felt different. The world jogged around the sun one more time. Ice covered it, then the ice receded, green came, green went. Nothing mattered to the world, and that was how he felt. But today, something-an intangible sense of fate, perhaps-permeated his bones. It could not fail to stir the great mass of static boredom that was his being to something like excitement.

The Beautiful One whispered to him in his chariot. "Another arrowhead, another God, another Armageddon."

"There is something different," he murmured, unnecessarily. Vocal conversation between them was conventional, superfluous. But they had always retained it, and Hark never knew which party was to blame.

The wind rushed past his ears like a hurricane. The chariot streaked across rivers, mountains, forests, seas, then over savannah diminishing to arid plains. Finally, the nightmares' flaming hooves pounded cracked earth, eon-old mud without even a trace of dust upon it. They threw up great chunks and clouds of the stuff. The castle of diseased ore appeared on the horizon.

Once, he had been puzzled by the symmetry: Upon reaching sentience, the young ones asked the eternal questions to which even he had no answer. Never was a thinking race born so dull it did not wonder at the great mysteries of existence. He had come to think of these questions as an integral side effect of the mind's evolution, just as feet were corollary to legs. And he had given them more years of thought than all the great philosophers put together. In the tower of iron, he could ponder an idea for years at a stretch. The physical world had long yielded its secrets, such as there were, to him. But of the spiritual world, he knew nothing.

One of his trains of thought had run thusly: I have learned about rocks and chemicals and atoms and photons and electrons, about gravity and relativity and evolution, about bones and eyes and cells. There is nothing in this world that keeps secrets from me. I know everything about this world, but I know nothing of the world of God. I know where each cell goes when an organism dies, but I do not know where its soul flies. Perhaps where my knowledge ends, the knowledge of God begins.

Unlike other men, he did know, at least, that God existed.

"You might do better to ask if I am really here," whispered the Beautiful One. "I may be your mind's invention."

Hark reposed on an iron throne in a darkened high-ceilinged hall. Narrow slits many feet above the ground let in a cold sort of sunlight.

"Why was I born?" he asked.

He could feel the Presence moving in the darkness around him, behind him. "You were born to destroy."

"And so I have always done," said Hark, and so he had always replied. Perhaps the conversation had occurred a hundred times.

"The man to whom you spoke missed one thing," said the Beautiful One.

"Of course. The eyes. The hands. The lungs. The mouth. He did not mention the mind."

The Beautiful One stood before him, young and golden and exquisite. "A fish is scales and fins. A bird is a beak and wings. A bear is fur and rage. But man is a mind. Form is irrelevant."

Hark said, "I have a mind and therefore I am a man. You have a mind and are man, as well."

The Beautiful One was amused. "Man is mind? God has mind? God is man? Man is God?"

"I was once a man," said Hark, troubled. He rested his chin upon a fist. "I was born man. You made me the Destroyer. As I have given to men, before."

"Perhaps you draw parallels where none exist. You can only see as far as you can see. You have thought for eons and realize thought alone cannot bring you the answers to the metaphysical questions. Nor can mastery over what you perceive. If there are limits to what you perceive, there are limits to what you can know."

"I am unsatisfied," said Hark.

The Beautiful One faded from sight. "You were unsatisfied ages past. I told you that knowledge would bring you only sorrow. Yet you preferred the secrets of the universe to living as other men. A beautiful symmetry."

Hark emerged from the iron castle to observe the men once again. By this time, they had covered the island on which they were born with villages. They had not spread to other parts of the world, but they would soon. Their technological level did not interest him. They would advance, rapidly or slowly; it did not matter. He visited religious sites, temples, and shrines. He read their legends and myths, extracting the stories from the minds of those who kept them. He examined paintings and carvings and runes. The man he had encountered so many years ago had not kept quiet. Hark found quite a few renderings of himself, although crude, in the religious paraphanelia. He searched and studied, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

In time, when men had covered half the world with roads and squat, heavy buildings of concrete, Hark appeared again. Any man wouldn't do; he searched and found the right one. This one was walking along a lonely road in the mountains. Hark allowed himself to be seen, and the man exclaimed.

"Hark the Destroyer! Hail, my Lord." The man bowed, touching four fingers to the earth. He was taller and more svelte than the earlier man, but still obviously of the same species, same extraction. Hark could see the genes they had in common, and the ones that were different, and the ones that had been, but were no longer, the same.

"What do you wish of me, divine one?" asked the man.

"I wish nothing of you," lied Hark. "I bring a gift."

"A gift? What sort of gift?"

Hark caused a heavy tome, bound in brass, and many pages thick, to appear. He hesitated, staring at it curiously for a moment, and then placed it in the air before him. It levitated there, bobbing only slightly because of uncontrollable atomic motion.

"A tome," whispered the man.

"Inside this grimoire are the secrets of the universe," said Hark. "Inside, you will find the knowledge to burn and break and join, to see and hear whatever you wish, and indeed to do whatever you wish."

"What is the price of this power?"

"The power is the price. Just as life carries death, power carries its price."

"I accept death, so I will accept the power," said the man, greedily taking the tome.

Hark returned quietly to his tower, careful not to impale this man on the knives of his chariot. The tome passed from hand to hand, never aging, seemingly indestructible, and etched with arcane formulas in a strange sort of shifting text. As man explored more of his world, multiplying rapidly, a select few who obtained the now legendary tome began to cultivate great, real power.

"That was different," said Hark to the Beautiful One. "Something is different this time, I'm sure of it."

"If you know everything, what does it mean if you encounter something different?" He replied.

"The book has everything," replied Hark, scarcely listening. "It may even have things I don't know."

"It is too late. Now, you can only watch."

Hark watched, with increasing caution, as the seed he had planted bore fruit, multiplied, evolved. Some men, extraordinarily gifted, mastered the material in the grimoire and became something more than men. As they deciphered more and more of the book, and more and more ambitious, they visited even greater atrocities upon their kindred. Enemies of the wizards were tortured by horrible green flames, that tormented even as they kept their victim alive. Whole cities were destroyed in the wars the wizards fought amongst themselves. They began to think of themselves as more than men. Their eyes reached further and further, past the trees, past the mountains, past the seas, to a savannah. Their minds postulated something even further, unimaginably distant, yet still in the same plane of existence. As their minds probed the secrets of the book and grew more and more diseased, they finally saw the infinite plain of cracked, dustless mud. On the horizon, never getting closer no matter how hard they pushed their minds, was the castle of rusted iron.

"Soon they will come. And perhaps, destroy you," said the Beautiful One, his voice for once free of irony.

Hark knew. Of course, he knew.

"Are you afraid?"

"I suppose it is the first time I have felt fear for eons," said Hark.

"Is it invigorating?"

"Of course."

The men drew closer. They had created giant scaly birds with powerful wings. They rode the birds across the ocean, feeding them mixtures of drugs and chemicals to artificially augment their strength. They cut through the starry sky, great black silhouettes blotting out constellations for long moments. The men caused fish to rise from the ocean, and let the flying birds eat the fish. They were bold, but they were afraid. They had possessed great power for a comparatively short time.

"You know what will happen?" asked Hark. He felt his destruction immiment. He who had outlived countless cycles of life saw the end, in its gem-like precision.

"Of course," replied the Beautiful One. "At least as one can know these things."

The great birds beat closer and closer. Their hideous shadows traced horrid patterns on the infinite cracked plains. Hark's servants, unbidden, threw their legions at the invaders. The birds tore the soulless minions to fluttering white pieces. Others, the men burnt with fireballs and lightning and gobs of plasma as hot as the sun.

"So there are things even you do not know?" Hark felt a quickening of his heart. Perhaps he fooled himself at having caught Him in a paradox. Hark had never heard Him utter anything that could not have spontaneously sprung from his mind.

"Indeed."

"You give me a glimpse of infinity," said Hark, grateful.

"Such a small concession, yet immense, no?"

"Why was I born?"

The terrible birds came whistling over the plains like cyclones. The legions of defenders lay ripped and dying, by now miles behind them. The men could now see the iron tower, tall and hideous and unnatural. Having found out there was something great and ancient in the world, they had been filled with the need to see it. Having seen it, they were filled with the need to destroy it.

"To destroy," said the Beautiful One, smiling gently at him.

"To destroy you?" asked Hark.

"You will have time for one more question."

"Are you God?"

The Beautiful One touched his shoulder in compassion. "I am man."

Then the vengeful men were upon them. They unleashed intricate whirlwinds of steel daggers, tightly focused beams of cosmic particles, and streams of virulent acid. Hark's body, eyes, hands, lungs, mouth, and mind, came apart under the barrage. Soon the men stood over his tattered remains, which even now disintegrated into atoms, staring at the legendary evil they had abolished. They had destroyed the only being with their power. Soon, inevitably, they would struggle amongst themselves, and one would emerge victorious.

They could in no way perceive the Beautiful One, who faded from view with Hark's consciousness.