“You are not Al-Hamadi.” The minister reached for the comm on his belt and stared at the inert device.
Facing him, the body of Al- Hamadi had grown younger, the skin tighter, the bones and joints denser and more stable. His voice had grown deeper. “You have the chance to join us, to serve Adam.”
The minister lowered the dead comm unit and stepped toward the door.
“This is the office of the Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations—I assure you we are completely isolated, completely private.”
The Naval Minister still tried the door. It didn’t open. He turned his back to it to face the man who was not quite Al-Hamadi anymore. “What is this?”
“It is the beginning of something wonderful.” He held his hands out to the Naval Minister. “Serve Adam and Paradise will be yours.”
“What manner of devil are you?”
“There are no devils. No angels. Only Adam, his followers, and remnants of extinct flesh.” He placed his hands upon the Naval Minister’s face. “Give yourself over to him, and you shall live forever.”
“You are asking me to reject God and the Caliphate. For what? A promise of words? For the lies of some creature impersonating Al-Hamadi?”
“But if I spoke truth?”
“You do not.”
“If I did?” He caressed the minister’s face. The man’s skin was slick with sweat. “If I spoke for the being that could give you life eternal, transcendence, an existence unimaginable to one of the flesh?”
He could tell by the expression that the minister chose his words very carefully. “Such powers are reserved only for God. If you spoke truth, then you would be speaking for God, whom I am bound to obey.”
“And if God told you that the time of the Caliphate is at an end?”
“I serve God’s will.” The minister glared at him. “But we both know you do not speak for God.”
The creature who once was Al-Hamadi smiled. “Oh, but I do, and He welcomes your service.” The minister’s eyes widened as the creature’s hands sank into his flesh.
The time was near an end for Yousef Al-Hamadi. After enlightening the Naval Minister, he pulled his skin back around himself, showing only the elderly broken form of the Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations. He walked into the conference room to face eighteen cabinet-level ministers, all physically present this time. The restrictions Al-Hamadi made to the communications net limited the ability of anyone to be present electronically. So the audience was limited to everyone who had been within an hour’s travel time at the time the Voice appeared—with the exception of the Naval Minister, who was now busy ordering every active vessel in the system to rendezvous with the Voice.
The door closed upon Al-Hamadi’s entrance, and the conference room became secure, a larger version of Al-Hamadi’s office.
Again, all the ministers turned to face him as he walked to the head of the conference table. Again, he walked slowly, leaning heavily on the cane, extending the silence.
This time the holo behind him showed an image of the outer system where the Prophet’s Voice slid through space, following an accelerated approach that would intercept Khamsin’s orbit in less than seventy-two hours. He set down the cane and spread his hands on the table before him. He leaned in, facing the eighteen ministers, the heart of the Caliphate’s government.
He smiled.
“The Prophet’s Voice has returned, and it has brought with it exceptional news for the future of the Caliphate.”
The room broke into excited chatter.
“It has come to offer you Paradise.”
The chatter trailed off and died. The Minister in Charge of the Suppression of Vice spoke up. “What did you say?”
“You have a choice. An end to death,” Al-Hamadi said, “or an end to life.”
Only four ministers ended up choosing the latter. The Minister in Charge of the Suppression of Vice was among them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Purification
“The worst atrocities are committed with the best of intentions.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“If we have broken any idols, it is through the transfer of idolatry.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard) 10 AU from Khamsin-Epsilon Eridani
They tached into the fringe of the system, beyond where the wormholes had once orbited.
Rebecca Tsoravitch watched as the Prophet’s Voice came home to Epsilon Eridani and the heart of the Caliphate. She saw the system with every sensor the Voice possessed, as much a part of the ship as its sovereign, Adam, or the millions of others liberated from the stasis that had been the Hall of Minds back on Salmagundi. Not all of them were fully embodied yet, but it wasn’t necessary. They were here, with Adam, a army dedicated to bringing humanity to His light. When they needed bodies, they would have them.
And she saw the outer system in clarity not only beyond human capability, but beyond human conception. She could see every rocky mass here, orbiting the star. More important, she saw another mass, a cloud of interstellar dust decelerating against the solar wind, a vast arc of diffuse mass that, unlike the rocks in orbit around Epsilon Eridani, communicated with Adam and the chosen aboard the Voice.
The dust here in the outer system had begun life as part of the Xi Virginis system. In total, it amounted to several large asteroids’ worth of matter that had been transformed, decades ago, to a semiautonomous extension of Adam’s will. The cloud had emerged from the wormholes that had sped into the Epsilon Eridani system, hidden by the mass and energy of its portal into this system. It had emerged opposite the direction of motion, at a velocity that left it traveling into the system considerably slower than the wormhole, and at a safe distance from the impact when it occurred.
To the human observers inside the system the cloud would be inert, non- reflective, and so diffuse to be almost invisible in the vast emptiness in the outer system.
Of course, the cloud, a vast coalescing arc of matter dozens of AU across, was far from inert. Not only had it independently organized itself in preparation for Adam’s arrival, it had been consuming stray matter from the outer system, transforming it into more of itself, so that the cloud was now five times its original mass and three times the size of the cloud that had taken Salmagundi.
She could hear the cloud talk to itself, coordinating its elements, a low-level net of transmissions between individual motes that resembled somewhat the chatter between individual neurons in an animal’s brain.
With other eyes that saw in other spectra, she saw the approach of the Caliphate navy, a flotilla converging from all quarters of the system to rendezvous with the Voice. In some sense it was a similar dance to that of the cloud, individual granules embedded in a web of communication that drew them together, independent organisms that acted as a single creature tied together by the diffuse act of communication.
Central to both organisms was the Voice. The ship was their focus, and as the kilometer-long artifact drifted insystem, both organisms converged to coalesce around its heart, interpenetrating as they did so.
The Caliphate ships ventured into the cloud without realizing they had done so. Even as she sensed the approach of their transponders, the dent of their mass in the space around the Voice, and the saturation of their communications channels as Adam gave the pilots their choice—as that happened, she felt the skin of their vessels through the billion fingers of the cloud enveloping them, she felt the heat of their drives as those fingers drilled invisibly through the layers of material making up the small bubble of atmosphere that carried a hundred small sparks of consciousness into Adam’s presence.
As the cloud infiltrated each vessel, she could feel the heat of each person’s breath, the throb of their pulse. She could hear them answer Adam. She could see some of those lights flicker out as Adam sent more willing minds to replace them.
She even saw the motions on the still-distant planet Kh
amsin, the movements of Adam’s agents, commanding the mechanisms of the Caliphate government to embrace the newcomers, however unknowingly.
Tsoravitch absorbed every stream of data that came within her reach. Her peers, those others Adam had elevated, might have contented themselves with some small slice of the advance. She could not. No sensor, no communications channel, no slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, none of it completed the obsessive need to know.
It was as if her mind had become a black hole where data vanished without ever filling her. Even though she was physically embodied, with her redheaded human form sitting within one of the crew cabins of the Voice, her mind spread subtly though the Voice’s network, diffusing her self so her data lust would not be so apparent to the others.
She hid herself mainly because what she did seemed exceptional. Sifting through all the knowledge, all the data available to her, she knew that none of Adam’s recent converts shared her wide- ranging eyes and ears. Even Adam, who seemed to absorb every scrap of information the Voice swam in, seemed less intent on the details rather than overall patterns. Even so, she was certain that Adam must be aware of her growing local omniscience . . .
Don’t give him too much credit.
The thought sped by in the flood of data, almost anonymous, layered against the Babel that resonated through the dataspace that was the Epsilon Eridani system. She grabbed on to it after the fact, giving it her undivided attention for the scant moment for her to realize that it was, in fact, her own thought.
Her own thought, originating in the space that she still considered her mind, as diffuse as that had become. Her thought, but not her thought. It came from her mind, but not from her own volition, and not in her own voice.
Her eyes, physical, biological eyes, snapped open. Suddenly her awareness had drained into the single spark of awareness within the skull of the body sitting in the crew cabin of the Voice. In a fraction of a moment she had gone from perceiving the breathing, heartbeat, and galvanic skin response of a hundred Caliphate pilots converging on the Voice to being hyperaware of sucking in her own breath, of the sweat glazing her own skin, and her pulse throbbing copper in her throat.
It had to be Adam, he knew . . .
What does he know? That you do not worship him?
“Who’s there?” Her words were raw, her mouth so dry her lips cracked when she spoke so much as a hoarse whisper. The fear crushed against her, a black sensation completely lacking in information, almost the negation of data.
You don’t need to speak, Rebecca.
Adam? she thought at the vaguely familiar voice in her head.
Something laughed inside her and she felt herself begin to hyperventilate.
Calm yourself.
She sucked in a shuddering breath and tried to control her breathing. Thinking of it was enough; suddenly her physical body calmed its reaction, respiration and heart rate slowing.
Good. Always remember, you control that body now. Not vice versa.
Are you Adam?
I’m what he was, once. Close your eyes and come to me.
She wiped her sweaty palms against her jumpsuit and stared at her legs. She wondered at herself, if the physical her was still really her, and if it wasn’t, if the mental version was any more real. Any more her.
Rebecca Tsoravitch closed her eyes.
For the first few moments she was enclosed within her own mind, seeing her own thoughts and memories with the same preternatural clarity with which she perceived the sensor data from the Voice. She saw, and understood the whole, and within it something more.
More alien data had been salted within her own memories. Thoughts and images that were not her own had found themselves in the depths of her own consciousness. As she had with the alien threads of Adam’s memory of Xi Virginis, she pulled them together and created a whole.
When she was done, somewhere her physical body took in a breath that was nearly a gasp.
With the alien strands of data in her own memories she had constructed another person in her mind’s eye. A hairless avatar with brown skin and luminescent tattoos. He wore threadbare ship’s overalls that had a shoulder patch that read simply Nomad, and stitching across his left breast reading Tjaele Mosasa.
In her mental image, they stood on the bridge of an ancient vessel. The computers filling the cramped space seemed centuries out of date, the displays flat, most showing a white logo on pale blue, a polar map flanked by a pair of stylized leafy branches.
“Welcome to the Luxembourg,” Mosasa said.
Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard) Khamsin-Epsilon Eridani
The being that had been Yousef Al-Hamadi stood upon the roof of the Ministry of External Relations of the Eridani Caliphate. Throughout the city below him, klaxons sounded as a flood of people tried to exit Al Meftah. It did not concern him. He had never meant to overcome the whole of the Caliphate government. Such an attempt, however stealthy, was doomed to eventual discovery.
His role as Al-Hamadi had only been to facilitate. He only needed to push the Caliphate down particular paths. Even the ministers could only restrain the State so much before too many levels of the governmental organism realized that something was happening. The disintegration of domestic authority had begun as soon as Adam had initiated his embrace of Khamsin.
In the sky, the thread of Adam’s embrace was just visible, far above the clouds, arching horizon to horizon over the southern sky, where the great cloud had begun to coalesce in an equatorial orbit.
Within hours, the masquerade would be over; no longer would he need to walk among the unenlightened. Soon he would rejoin Adam’s presence.
He spread his arms and waited.
PART SIX
Transubstantiation
“By thought I embrace the universal.”
—BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662)
CHAPTER THIRTY
Absolution
“The universe grants no one special privileges, even privilege to be disadvantaged.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Every individual . . . is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.”
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)
Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard) 1,750,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The door to the cabin hissed open and Toni II blinked her eyes and yawned as her younger sibling entered their now-shared cabin.
“Have you gotten any sleep in the past two days?” she asked Toni.
Toni shrugged, then caught the edge of the upper bunk before she drifted off to the ceiling. The cabin had been fitted with zero-G sleeping bags, but was originally designed with gravity in mind, so there were two horizontal bunks taking up most of the space.
“I caught a nap here and there. I’m still allegedly in command.”
“You know, we could trade off. I don’t think anyone would notice.”
“I might take you up on that, though I just got used to calling you Beth.”
Toni II pulled herself up, out of the sleeping bag. Her sister looked like hell, straggling hair floating free, her jumpsuit stained with sweat and a few drops of blood, her eyes glazed with fatigue. “How long did you let me crash here? It was only supposed to be a couple of hours.”
“More than a couple. No sense both of us being exhausted.”
“Please tell me you’ve come back to get some rest yourself.”
“Well, I wanted to get you. There’s one more thing—”
“Good lord, how many ‘one more things’ are there going to be?”
Toni smiled weakly. “Just the one. Get dressed.”
As Toni II pulled her jumpsuit out of stowage, she asked, “Any more detail on our refugees?” In the chaos of off-loading the wounded, it was clear from the uniforms that there were four groups—possibly five, depending on how you counted. One group was the mercenaries that included Captain Vijayanagara Parvi, who obviously was the captain of the dropship Khalid the same way Toni was captain of the Daedalus. That group was
the smallest, including four people and one fatality—one of the four being a monstrous black-eyed tiger moreau.
Then were the dozen members of the Caliphate navy. They’d suffered most of the injuries. Toni II had some training in reading Caliphate insignia, and all the people present were an engineering detail, technical support crew, not the kind of troops you’d expect on a dropship.
Add to that six men in body armor who were equipped as if they were riot police rather than infantry. They bore completely novel insignia with a legend that read “Ashley Militia.” Without the helmets, the men in the black armor were marked by square tattoos across their foreheads. The one with the least had four tats, the one with the most had at least seven, though some were lost under his hairline.
Those tats grouped those guys with two of the civilians, a young guy with a single tat on his forehead, and the worst off of the injured, a hairless old man with more than a dozen of the things ringing his head. The remaining civilians were remnants of the same scientific expedition the mercenaries came from.
As she dressed, Toni told her what else had come out.
“The mercenaries and the science team did go as far as Xi Virginis.” Toni told her an abbreviated version of what had brought these people back to Bakunin, about the disappearance of the star Xi Virginis, about the Caliphate’s massive new carriers, about the descent of Adam to the colony planet of Salmagundi.
“So the guys with the tattoos are from Salmagundi?”
“Yes. As far as they know, the Khalid was the only ship to escape.”
“Do we believe them?”
“I think so. How much mass and energy would anyone need to launch that attack on the wormhole network?”
“A whole star?”
“It had to go somewhere.”
“So what do we do now? It doesn’t sound like this Adam is going to stay put.”