Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

  While he could communicate with every consulate, they were still at the mercy of tach-comm transmissions that would take time, more so because only a few planetary tach-comm transmitters were on-line after Sol’s seven wormholes were destroyed. Even if there hadn’t been disruptions in the communication network, it still would take two days for a transmission to reach even the closest planet.

  Just as fast as the new Caliphate tach-ships.

  Despite his efforts, much seemed too little, too late. The various powers might have averted open war if he had brought them Mallory’s information sooner. The threat of an advanced aggressive nanotech-based civilization attacking human space was enough to give everyone, including the Caliphate, pause. But shots had already been fired, and while averting a war was difficult, stopping one that was underway was infinitely more so.

  He reached his offices and threw open the door. He didn’t bother concealing the evidence of his haste as he caught his breath.

  Inside his office, a somewhat ordinary man sat on an ornate embroidered chair. Dark hair, olive skin, with features showing descent from one of the European cultures along the Mediterranean. He sat with arms folded, flanked by a pair of Swiss Guards.

  “I’d stand, Your Grace, but your guards seem a little nervous.”

  Cardinal Anderson stared at his unexpected guest, the one who had set off security alerts all across the Vatican. Normally such an intruder was far beneath the notice of anyone but rank-and-file security personnel. If it wasn’t for a series of alarming statements he had made when captured, Anderson may never have known the man existed.

  He looked at the pair of guards and said, “Leave us.”

  “Your Grace?”

  “I need to talk to this man alone. I presume you checked him for weapons?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  He stepped aside and waved out the open door. “Then, if you would please wait outside?”

  He waited as the guards filed past him, into the hallway. When the door shut behind them, his guest said, “Isn’t this a little reckless of you?”

  “Any threat they could have dealt with can also be dealt with quicker and more precisely by the automated systems in this room. And if you can defeat those, the guards aren’t a deterrent, just potential casualties.” Cardinal Anderson slid behind his desk. “I would strongly suggest that their absence doesn’t encourage you to make any aggressive moves.”

  “Aggression is far from my intent.”

  “You seem remarkably calm.”

  “Should I not be?”

  “You tell me. You walk blithely into a secure area in the Apostolic Palace, and when confronted by guards, you request an audience with me. Not the pope, but the Bishop of Ostia. Why me?”

  “You’re the Vatican’s chief diplomat.”

  “And what exactly did you mean when you told the guards, ‘The Other comes. It brings the change without choice or consent. It will destroy all it does not consume’?”

  The man leaned back and said, “I wanted to get your attention.”

  “Where did you hear those words?”

  “You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

  “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “I’ve seen the same tach-comm you did.”

  Cardinal Anderson stared at the man, looking for signs of who he was, where he came from. Below the surface of his desk, a holo ran the dossier on his visitor. It was remarkably light. There were recordings of his arrival at Vatican City, his entry into the palace, his entry into the nonpublic areas. There were gigs of biometric data and scans, from DNA to retina prints to electrical profiles of brain activity.

  As thoroughly as they examined this man, no record of him seemed to exist anywhere else. Not in the Vatican’s databases, and not in the records of any police or intelligence agency on Earth.

  “So,” he asked the man, “what do I call you?”

  “Jonah Dacham. I’ve had countless aliases, but that was the name I was born with.” Jonah smiled. “The first time anyway.”

  Cardinal Anderson felt a growing discomfort in the pit of his stomach, a flaring of the unease he had felt upon watching the black figure in the tach-comm transmission. “So, Mr. Dacham, why are you here, and why did you want to talk to me?”

  “I represent a party that wishes to negotiate directly with the Vatican, a mutual defense pact.”

  “What party?”

  “Your Grace, only half of that message was directed at you.”

  Cardinal Anderson swallowed as he remembered the final part of the message Jonah Dacham had quoted: If any children of Proteus hear the warnings of your vessel, you must defend those who do not accept.

  “You are saying you are an agent of Proteus?”

  “An emissary.”

  “There is no Proteus. Their last outpost was destroyed centuries ago.”

  “Precisely why this negotiation is necessary. Any assistance we give you makes us vulnerable. You would destroy us for possessing your ‘heretical’ technologies.”

  “Such things are evil, dangerous—”

  “And have coexisted with you for hundreds of years.”

  Cardinal Anderson leaned back and shook his head.

  Dacham continued. “You’re facing a power that has not accepted the same restraint we have. Proteus is defined by its restraint. No one comes to us except by choice. We can help you defend against this Other. But only if you ask, and only if we are given something in return.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “Absolution by the pope.”

  “What?”

  “We need the pope to publicly announce that the position of the Church is that the people of Proteus are no more sinful than humanity in general. That we are as entitled to follow our path as you are yours. He needs to say that the sin is not in the technologies but what is done with them.”

  “You don’t know what you ask.”

  “I ask nothing. I offer. Just allowing you to know that Proteus still exists is a danger to us. But what is coming requires at least this much from us. We must offer you aid.” He leaned forward. “But not if we suffer destruction at your hands.”

  Cardinal Anderson shook his head. “Centuries of doctrine are not going to be overturned on the word of one man.”

  “I expected as much,” Jonah said.

  “And I am afraid I cannot let you leave.”

  “I expected that as well. However, do not expect to gain much information from me. When Proteus reconstructed this body for me, I left behind any knowledge of the location of their colonies.”

  This man was probably mad. But what frightened Cardinal Anderson was the possibility he wasn’t.

  “Why come here, Mr. Dacham, if you were certain of failure?”

  “I haven’t failed, Your Grace.”

  “Oh?”

  “In time, when you see the scope of the situation, I anticipate your mind will change. Even if it doesn’t, part of me missed being human.”

  Cardinal Anderson called the guards back and had Jonah Dacham escorted to one of the secure guest rooms, with orders to keep him there.

  * * * *

  Date: 2526.7.21 (Standard)

  Khamsin —Epsilon Eridani

  Adam walked the streets of the city that had once been Al Meftah, capital of the Eridani Caliphate. He was pleased to see the changes he had wrought. Gone were the ugly, chaotic human buildings, replaced by regular patterns of organic shapes growing from the rocky substance of the planet itself. Adam’s architecture recalled the best and most enduring forms of the Race.

  Everywhere stood the chosen, those who had elected to follow him into the coming world. Most were still paralyzed by the awe of what had happened, though all had the presence of mind to bow their heads in respect as he passed. It wasn’t a thing he explicitly required of them, but the sight comforted him and gave him the confidence that his plans would reach fruition whatever small obstacles might still be on his path.

  Even if h
e was only able to save a third of the population here, that was almost a billion souls. More than adequate.

  He reached his destination at the site where once stood the Ministry of External Relations. In its place now stood a rounded wall of polished stone that arced fifty meters above where Adam stood. The wall was gray and veined in dark blue, like granite, but the veins weren’t random. They formed a regular network that hinted at the tightly ordered structure within the stone that made it stronger and more enduring than the planet it was made from.

  As Adam reached the wall, a seam formed, widening fluidly into a circular opening. Beyond the door was an ovoid chamber lit with a yellow-red light that recalled the living spaces once preferred by the Race. However, the people in the room wore the same humanoid form that Adam wore now. That didn’t trouble Adam; he had learned that life’s outward form was infinitely mutable.

  The occupants of the room stood and bowed their heads upon his entry. He noted that few had used their newfound gift to change their outward appearance. Anyone familiar with the Caliphate government would still recognize them. All except the one who had been playing the role of Yousef Al-Hamadi, who now stood out starkly in the midst of the Caliphate ministers. Instead of Al-Hamadi’s form, Adam’s disciple now wore the form of Ms. Columbia, a tall, muscular female of African ancestry several skin-shades darker than the others in this room.

  Ms. Columbia had been the first skin that Adam had made his disciple AI wear, shortly after reviving it. His disciple had come from the ashes of one of the Race’s dead cities, wiped of any prior memory. Within his disciple’s deepest identity, her self-image now looked like Ms. Columbia.

  Life’s outward form is infinitely mutable, Adam reflected. There is no requirement that the children resemble the parent. He himself did not see himself as one of the amoeboid creatures who had originally created him, and his disciples need not either.

  It was, however, a reminder of the loss that propelled him forward.

  “Welcome to the new age, leaders of Khamsin,” he said.

  Everyone except Ms. Columbia said, “Peace be upon you, Adam.”

  “You are troubled,” he addressed Ms. Columbia.

  “I’ve failed you,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Securing communications was not complete before your arrival. There was a five-minute transmission from one of the planetary tach-comm transmitters in the southern hemisphere. I made too great an assumption on how tightly the Ministry of External Relations controlled its agents. I am at fault.”

  Adam smiled, granting his servants an expression of beatific forgiveness. If he had been weaker, before he had recognized his own apotheosis, he would have struck down his disciple, the ministers, perhaps the entire planet. Everything would have been reduced to ash in the heat of his rage.

  Everything he had set in motion was meticulously balanced, a plan developed over centuries using the Race’s social programming, every variable under tight control. His infernal sibling was the most destabilizing factor and needed to be removed first, but after that, his own ascendancy required that he move faster than the ability of the worlds of men to communicate. Shutting down lines of communication was vital, as well as controlling a fleet of tach-ships that could move as fast as the transmissions themselves.

  Transmissions that passed any data about him to systems that weren’t yet ready for his arrival disrupted the entire wide net of political, social, and cultural factors he had arrayed in his favor over the past centuries.

  Were he still a mundane AI mucking about in the material world like Mosasa, each lapse like this would have been a dangerous threat to his plans. But he had risen above those concerns. He movedthrough worlds, the will of the universe made manifest.

  He was God, and he could afford to be merciful.

  “Do not dwell on such a lapse. Focus on the Glory that is to come.”

  >

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Invocations

  “Insanity doesn’t mean the voices are wrong.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Question with boldness even the existence of God.”

  — thomas Jefferson

  (1743-1826)

  Date: 2526.7.24 (Standard)

  1,750,000 km from Bakunin - BD+50°1725

  Alexander Shane rested in one of the Daedalus’ three medical bays, barely stable, the most seriously injured survivor from the Khalid. The cover of the bay was mostly transparent, revealing most of Shane’s abused body. To Parvi, he looked like a fossil trapped in amber. It was hard to credit the displays on the medbay that claimed he still lived.

  Parvi stared at the half-dead old man, trying to understand what was going on around her. She followed Mallory’s lead, mostly because she couldn’t think of another path that didn’t amount to sitting down and waiting for Adam to come.

  But right now, Mallory’s plan didn’t amount to much more than waiting. He had monopolized all the communications on both ships. Six people, three in each cockpit, were individually contacting every single ship they could reach, passing on details of Adam’s invasion and—so far unsuccessfully—attempting to recruit a force to use against Adam.

  How many more innocents will die in this war?

  She reached out and touched the medbay. The transparent surface was surprisingly warm against her hand.

  She traced the outline of Shane’s face.

  “What were you trying to tell me?” she whispered to him.,

  The memory of Shane’s words was all tied up in the nightmare she had after taching in here. She tried to recall what he had said, but it was muddled and fragmentary. But she had the uncomfortable sense that he had told her something important.

  “But what would you know about this? About anything?”

  “Captain Parvi?”

  She turned so quickly that she almost sent herself tumbling. If nothing else, I want to feel gravity again before I die.

  She steadied herself and saw Dr. Brody floating into the room with her. “What are you doing here?”

  He gestured to his broken arm. “This is hurting like hell. I was hoping to find some painkillers.” He clumsily pushed himself so he floated up to Shane’s medbay next to Parvi. “Visiting?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Brody looked at her quizzically. “Unless the launch from Salmagundi rattled my brain more than I remember, I don’t think you two ever got the chance to pass the time of day.”

  “Not exactly,” Parvi said. She stared into Shane’s face.

  “Not exactly?

  “I think he tried to tell me something. He regained consciousness briefly after we tached in. Babbling, and I was half-hallucinating myself. I’ve been racking my memory, trying to understand what he said.” She looked up at Brody. “But I probably imagined it. What could he know about Adam?”

  Brody stared at her, his expression distant, staring past her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Did anyone tell you how he interrogated us?”

  * * * *

  Dr. Dörner and Dr. Brody faced her across the cramped width of one of theDaedalus’ crew cabins. She looked from the thin blonde xenobiologist to the dark, round anthropologist with the busted arm. What they told her about Salmagundi was still sinking in.

  “You mean Shane, Flynn, the others all have other people’s minds running around their skulls?” The thought made her skin crawl.

  “Yes,” Brody said, nodding.

  “And Shane took you two, Mallory, and Dr. Pak ...” She stared at the edges of their necks where she could just see the healing scars from the surgery they’d described. She felt herself becoming physically ill. She gulped down bile and took a few deep breaths through her mouth.

  “Are you all right?” Brody asked.

  Parvi nodded, staring at the floor, allowing her head to clear. She felt Dörner’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right. We made it through. Though I want to kn
ow why you wanted me to relive that, Sam.”

  “I think I understand,” Parvi said.

  Dörner let go. “Can you tell me?”

  “Shane had all the knowledge of three fifths of Mosasa’s science team, as well as our Jesuit spy,” Parvi said. “Maybe he came to some conclusions.”