“Hey, pal, know what? Possessing that monster didn’t cure you, it made you take a swan dive over the edge.”
“Perhaps. But which of us is content?”
“You got Kiera to worry about. Remember? How come you don’t flap off into the sunset?”
“As you say, Kiera is a problem.”
“Right, so don’t come over all superior.”
“I wasn’t. Your offer to deal interests me. It may be possible to come to some arrangement. I have a notion, but it’ll take some time to check the requirements. Once you’re back on Almaden, I’ll look you up.”
Coming down to the gym in the Hilton’s basement always stirred Kiera’s darker animal feelings. She rather enjoyed her new role of laid back vamp, letting her eye wander over the young men being put through their paces by a gruff Malone. Their apprehension was pleasurable as they saw her watching, the nudges and worried glances. It wasn’t that she’d never had affairs back on New Munich, she’d taken several lovers during her marriage, both before and after her husband’s fall from grace. But they’d all been insipid, cautious encounters. Most of the thrill had come from the concept of having an affair, of cheating and not getting caught. The sex had never been anything special.
Now though, she was free to explore her sexuality to the full, with no one to disapprove or condemn. Part of her allure came from being a woman in power, she was a challenge to any male; the rest came from Marie Skibbow’s gorgeous body. It was the second factor which brought her down here to the non-possessed. Possessed lovers, like poor old Stanyon, were so artificial. Men inevitably gave themselves big penises, could stay erect all night, had Greek-god bodies. Strutting clichés, that spoke volumes about their weaknesses and insecurities.
She much preferred the youngsters from the gym for the reality they provided. Unable to hide behind any mental or physical illusion, sex with them was raw and primitive. Dominating them in bed, without a single inhibition, was utterly delicious. And Marie herself had a surprising amount of knowledge which Kiera could extract and experiment with.
Despised memories and skill gained during a long river journey spent capitulating to an old man called Len Buchannan. Enduring the nightly humiliation for one reason alone, the freedom which waited at the end of the river. The girl had a single minded determination which Kiera quite admired. It came close to her own. Even now, captive and tragic, inside her mental prison, Marie clung to the notion of deliverance.
But how? Kiera wondered lightly.
Somehow. One day.
Not with me in command of you.
Nothing lasts forever. As you know.
Kiera dismissed the impudent girl from her thoughts with a derisory mental sneer. Her gaze found a rather delicious nineteen-year-old hammering his fists into a long leather punch bag. The desperate aggression and sweating muscles were highly arousing. He knew she was standing behind him, but refused to turn. Hoping if he avoided eye contact she would pass by. She crooked a finger at Malone, who came over reluctantly.
“What’s his name?” she asked huskily.
“Jamie.” The squat trainer’s thoughts were full of contempt.
“Are you frightened of me, Jamie?”
He stopped punching, steadying the bag. Gentle grey eyes stared at her levelly. “You, no. What you can do, yeah.”
She applauded languidly. “Very good. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.” She glanced down at Malone. “I’ll bring him back to you in the morning.”
Malone took his cap off, and spat on the floor. “Whatever you say, Kiera.”
She walked right up to Jamie, enjoying his discomfort at her proximity.
“Oh dear, I’m not that bad am I?” she murmured.
He was a head taller than her. When he looked down, his eyes were drawn the rich tanned skin revealed by her mauve summer dress. Embarrassment warred with other, more subtle emotions. Kiera grinned in victory. At least something was going right tonight. Capone and his damn sedition plans! She took his big hand in hers, and began to lead him out of the gym like a giant puppy. Before she reached the double doors, they swung open. Luigi barged through, carrying a pile of towels. He caught sight of Kiera, and glared angrily. Commander of the fleet, now running trivial demeaning errands for the nonentity Malone. The resentment twisting him up was almost strong enough to manifest itself as pernicious violence; he was sure she was here simply to witness his humiliation first hand. The boss’s new favourite gloating over her ex-rival’s downfall.
“Luigi,” Kiera said brightly. “Fancy seeing you here. How wonderful.”
“Piss off, bitch.” He elbowed past her, scowling.
“After the towels, will you be going down on your knees to tie up their shoes?”
Luigi twisted in mid step, and marched back to her. He thrust his head forward so their noses were touching. “You’re a whore. A very cheap whore. With only one thing to sell. When the Organization has used up your hellhawks, you’ll be nothing. Best thing is, you know it’s coming. Your bullshit ice empress routine doesn’t fool anyone. This whole damn asteroid is laughing at you.”
“Of course it’s coming,” she said serenely. “But they wouldn’t be used up if the fleet was commanded properly.”
Confusion marred his face and his thoughts. “What?”
That uncertainty was enough for Kiera. She patted Jamie’s heavily muscled forearm. “Why don’t you take those heavy towels from Luigi, darling. It looks like I won’t be needing you tonight, after all.”
Jamie peered over the pile of towels unexpectedly dumped in his arms, watching the doors close behind Kiera and Luigi. “I don’t get it,” he complained. Part of him had actually been quite looking forward to the sex, despite what the others kept saying about the Deadnight witch.
Malone patted the big lad’s shoulder in a paternal fashion. “Don’t worry about it, my boy. You’re well off out of that kind of scene.”
Given Dr Pierce Gilmore’s senior position within the CNIS’s scientific staff, weapons analysis division, it was inevitable that a large part of his nature tended towards the bureaucratic. Precise and methodical in his work, he believed strongly in following sanctioned procedures to the letter during his investigations. Such adherence to protocol was something of a joke among his department’s junior staff, who accused him of inflexibility and lack of imagination. He endured their behind-his-back humour stoically, while politely and consistently refusing to take short cuts and play up to wild hunches. To his credit, it was exactly the kind of leadership the weapons division needed.
Eternal patience is a prime requisite in the dismantling of unknown weapons that have been designed illegally (mostly under government patronage) and tend to incorporate elements that actively discourage close examination. In the seven years he’d held his post, the division’s safety record was exemplary.
Also to his credit, he didn’t indulge in the usual internal empire building so beloved of government employees, especially those who, like him, were essentially unaccountable. As a result, his office was a modest one, roughly equivalent to the entitlement of a middle manager in some multistellar company. There were few personal items, some ornaments and desktop solid images; a shelf of Stanhopea orchids flourishing under a slim solaris tube. The furniture was formal, a comfortable reproduction of the flared darkwood Midwest-ethnic style he’d grown up with. Broad holographic windows of Cheyenne’s heroically rugged countryside did little to disguise the room’s actual location, buried deep inside Trafalgar. In its favour, the electronic suite Gilmore had installed was a top-of-the range Edenist processor array verging on AI status. Such a system helped facilitate the twice weekly multi-disciplinary councils he chaired to investigate the capabilities of the possessed.
This was the second time the team heads had met since Jacqueline Couteur had made her bid for freedom in maximum security court three, and the aftermath was still affecting everyone’s mood. Professor Nowak, the quantum physicist, was first to arrive, helping himself to so
me of the coffee from the percolator jug which Gilmore kept going full time. Dr Hemmatu, the energy specialist, and Yusuf, the electronics chief, came in together talking in low tones. They gave Gilmore a perfunctory nod and sat down at the conference desk. Mattox was next, the neurology doctor keeping to himself as usual, choosing a chair one along the desk from Yusuf. Euru completed the group, sitting directly opposite Gilmore. In contrast to the rest of them, the dark-skinned Edenist appeared almost indecently happy.
Gilmore had known his deputy long enough to see it wasn’t just the usual contentment which all Edenists shared. “You have something?” he enquired.
“A voidhawk has just arrived from the Srinagar system. It was carrying an interesting recording.”
Hemmatu perked up. “From Valisk?” The independent habitat had supplied a large amount of very useful data on the behaviour of the possessed before it vanished.
“Yes, just before Rubra and Dariat took it away,” Euru said, smiling broadly. He instructed his bitek processor block to datavise the file to them.
The sensevise they received was a strange one, lacking the resolution normally associated with full nerve channel input. Conversions from Edenist habitat memories to a standard Adamist electronic format were notoriously quirky, but this was something else again. Nesting within its environment of pastel colours, tenuous scents, and mild tactorials, Gilmore tried bravely to avoid using the connotation: spectral. He failed dismally.
The memory was of Dariat, while he bobbed about on the surface of some icy water inside a dark polyp-walled tube. The cold was severe enough to penetrate even his energistic protection, judging by the way it was numbing his appropriated limbs, and making him shiver. A plump black woman clung to him, shaking violently inside her strange waistcoat of cushions.
> the Kohistan Consensus asked Dariat.
>
Consensus received his quick recollection of the beyond. His soul had become a feeble flicker of identity adrift in a nowhere at one remove from reality. Nowhere full of similar souls; all of them with the same craving, the sensations available on the other side.
The memory of someone else’s memory: if the sensenviron of the Valisk starscraper waste tube was tenuous, this was as insubstantial as a nearly-forgotten dream. The beyond, as far as Dariat was concerned, lacked any physical sensation, all that betrayed its presence was a transparent tapestry of emotions. Anguish and yearning flooded through the realm Souls clustered round, desperately suckling at his memories for the illusion of physical sensation they contained.
Confusion and fear reigned in Dariat’s mind. He wanted to flee. He wanted to plunge into the glorious star of sensation burning so bright as Kiera and Stanyon forced open a path into Horgan’s body. The beyond withered behind him as he surged along the tear through the barrier between planes of existence.
> Consensus asked.
Dariat gave them a visualization (perfectly clear this time) of desire overlaying actuality. More handsome features, thicker hair, brighter clothes. Like a hologram projection, but backed up by energy oozing out of the beyond to shore it up, providing solidity. Also, the destructive power, a mental thunderbolt, aimed and thrown amid boiling passion. The rush of energy from the beyond increasing a thousandfold, sizzling through the possessed body like an electric charge.
> The world around him altered, shifting to slippery shadows.
There were several more questions and observations on the nature of Dariat’s state, which the rebel possessor did his best to answer. In total, the recording amounted to over fifteen minutes.
“Wealth indeed,” Gilmore said when it ended. “This kind of clarification is just what we need to pursue a solution. It seemed to me as though Dariat actually had some freedom of movement in the beyond. To my mind, that implies physical dimensions.”
“A strange sort of space,” Nowak said. “From the way the souls were pressed close enough to overlap, there appeared to be very little of it. I won’t call it a place, but it’s definitely a unified area. It was almost a closed continuum, yet we know it exists in parallel to our own universe, so it must have infinite depth. That’s damn close to being paradoxical.” He shrugged, disturbed by his own reasoning.
“That perception ability Dariat demonstrated interests me,” Euru commented. “The effect is remarkably similar to a voidhawk’s mass perception sense.”
Gilmore looked across his desk to the tall Edenist, inviting him to continue.
“I’d say the possessed must be interpreting local energy resonances. Whatever type of energy they operate within, we know it pervades our universe, even if we can’t distinguish it ourselves yet.”
“If you’re right,” Nowak said, “that’s a further indication that our universe is conjunctive with this beyond realm, that there is no single interface point.”
“There has to be an identifiable connection,” Euru said. “Dariat was clearly aware of the lost souls while he occupied Horgan’s body. He could hear them—for want of a better phrase. They were pleading with the possessors the whole time, asking to be given bodies. Somewhere there is a connection, a conduit leading back there.”
Gilmore glanced round the desk to see if anyone else wanted to pick up on the point. They were all silent, concentrating on the implications Euru and Nowak raised. “I’ve been considering that we might need to approach this from a different angle,” he said. “After all, we’ve had a singular lack of success in trying to analyse the quantum signature of the effect, perhaps we should concentrate less on the exact nature of the beast, and more on what it does and implies.”
“In order to deal with it, we have to identify it,” Yusuf said.
“I’m not advocating a brute force and ignorance approach,” Gilmore replied. “But consider; when this crisis started, we believed we were dealing with an outbreak of some energy virus. I maintain that is essentially what we have here. Our souls are self-contained patterns capable of existence and travel outside the matrix of our bodies. Hemmatu, how would you say they are formed?”
The energy expert stroked his cheek with long fingers, pondering the question. “Yes, I think I see what you’re driving at. The beyond energy is apparently present in all matter, including cells, although the quantity involved must necessarily be extremely tenuous. Therefore as intelligence arises during life, it imprints itself into this energy somehow.”
“Exactly,” Gilmore said. “The thought patterns which arise in our neurone structure retain their cohesion once the brain dies. That is our soul. There’s nothing spiritual or religious about it, the entire concept is an entirely natural phenomenon, given the nature of the universe.”
“I’m not sure about denying religion,” Nowak said. “Being inescapably plugged into the universe at such a fundamental level seems somewhat spiritually impressive to me. Being at one with the cosmos, literally, makes us all part of God’s creation. Surely?”
Gilmore couldn’t quite work out if he was joking. A lot of physicists took to religion as they struggled with the unknowable boundaries of cosmology, almost as many as embraced atheism. “If we could just put that aside for the moment, please?”
Nowak grinned, waving a hand generously.
“What I’m getting at is that something is responsible for retaining a soul’s cohesion. Something glues those thoughts and memories together.
When Syrinx interviewed Malva, she was told: ‘Life begets souls.’ That it is ‘the pattern which sentience and self awareness exerts on the energy within the biological body.’ ”
“So souls accrue from the reaction of thoughts upon this energy,” Nowak said. “I’m not disputing the hypothesis. But how can that help us?”
“Because it’s only us: humans. Animals don’t have souls. Dariat and Laton never mentioned encountering them.”
“They never men
tioned encountering alien souls either,” Mattox said. “But according to the Kiint, they’re there.”
“It’s a big universe,” Nowak said.
“No,” Gilmore countered. “That can’t apply. Only some souls are trapped in the section we know about, the area near the boundary. Laton as good as confirmed that. After death, it’s possible to embark on the great journey. Again, his words.”
Euru shook his head sadly. “I wish I could believe him.”
“In this I agree with him, not that it has much bearing on my principal contention.”
“Which is?” Mattox asked.
“I believe I know the glue which holds souls together. It has to be sentience. Consider, an animal like a dog or cat has its individuality as a biological entity, but no soul. Why not? It has a neural structure, it has memories, it has thought processes operating inside that neural structure. Yet when it dies, all that loses coherence. Without a focus, a strong sense of identity, the pattern dissolves. There is no order.”
“The formless void,” Nowak muttered in amusement.
Gilmore disregarded the jibe. “We know a soul is a coherent entity, and both Couteur and Dariat have confirmed there is a timeflow within the beyond. They suffer entropy just as we do. I am convinced that makes them vulnerable.”