Tsoravitch nodded. “Rebecca allowed me . . .”
“Flynn?”
“What are you asking me?”
“Can I?”
“I think you’re asking, ‘May I?’ Gram.”
“You know calling me that is making me even more uncomfortable.”
“Not as uncomfortable as you’re making both of us.”
Tetsami realized that the ache she felt for her centuries-gone lover, whatever body he happened to inhabit right now, had become solidly physical.
Dom/Tsoravitch said, “You’re blushing.”
“Kiss her back, already.”
Tetsami sat up with Flynn’s repaired body, and kissed her back.
Colonel Bartholomew tried to raise any of the reunified PDC command, but none responded. Even the local units of the Eastern Division that were based with Proudhon didn’t acknowledge the contact. He couldn’t believe that things could have degraded like this. Adam had predicted the consolidation of power on Bakunin; he had placed him in a role that pushed him toward the top of that organization.
He was in command. He had to be.
One of the two soldiers left with him said flatly, “The orbital linac is firing.”
“No!” Colonel Bartholomew slammed his fist into the console before him. The blockade was supposed to stand down during Adam’s approach.
“Two definite contacts with incoming—”
“Don’t tell me about it,” he whispered. “We did all we could.”
“Sir, Adam will come.”
Colonel Bartholomew nodded and turned away from the communication console and faced the priest’s body. “I’m sure he will. Nothing man can control will stop him.”
“So why—” The man was interrupted by the sound of twisting metal. The door of the control room was bending, fracturing into facets interlaced with an angular web-work as dark as Bartholomew’s thoughts.
He raised his sidearm and pointed it at the door. “He will come, but I doubt we’ll be here to meet him.”
The door folded inward and Colonel Bartholomew fired before he ever saw Toni Valentine.
As the first of Adam’s dropships orbited into sight of Bakunin’s one continent, the massive defensive array of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation turned its fire on them.
The linear accelerators fired slugs of charged metal at the onrushing ships, an arc of projectiles approaching half the speed of light in velocity. Unlike the weaker projectiles that had vaporized the Xanadu but left the complexities of thinking mass intact, these projectiles carried enough energy that each hit not only exploded the physical structure of the dropships, but also released enough sterilizing radiation to lobotomize the web of thought contained within.
The defenders tore Adam apart seven times before the remaining dropships dispersed again, becoming a weak cloud that offered no resistance to the linac’s projectiles.
The planet should have offered no resistance to Him. He had chosen His people to prepare the way.
His people had failed Him.
It didn’t matter. He was vaster than His current incarnation. Whatever happened now, Adam knew He was spread throughout a dozen systems, soon a hundred. He had already sent parts of Himself abroad, carrying the knowledge of this planet’s defiance.
If He failed this once—and even the word burned in His mind like a brand, a mark of fallibility that infuriated Him—even if that came to pass, He would not fail. Adam would grace this world again, and again, and again; a thousand times, a million times, a billion—eventually He would claim Bakunin, or destroy it.
His cloud drifted into the orbit of the linacs, and He realized it would not come to that.
Toni II looked at her Protean self and swallowed. Toni was bent over Mallory, who looked old and frail where he had crumpled on the ground. She swallowed again before she asked, “Can you revive him?”
“No. It’s too late.”
“Not even—”
“It’s too late!” she snapped and turned away from Mallory’s corpse.
Toni II didn’t press her. She felt the guilt herself, at not seeing a trap that seemed obvious in retrospect. She had seen her Protean self vent that guilt, and the anger, on Colonel Bartholomew and his two allies—all of whom were now little more than a thin smear on the wall and an uncomfortable smell. She had no desire to tempt any more of that forward, not unless there was a hostile target in the area.
She walked over to a still-active console, her boots sticking to atomized colonel on the floor. The holo showed a schematic of the linacs in orbit. They were firing, but their target wasn’t visible in the schematic.
“Some good news,” she whispered at Toni. “Mole or not, the blockade is trying to defend the surface.”
“Oh?” Toni stepped up next to her. “What are they firing at?”
“Adam, I presume. It could be over the horiz—” The words caught in her throat as one of the linacs disappeared from the holo. Followed by another. And another.
“I don’t believe this,” Toni II said.
Toni sighed. “Believe it. We better get aboveground if I’m going to do anything to defend this city.”
Above the planet, the orbital defenses disintegrated into Adam’s being, more than making up for the mass of Himself lost to the seven dropships. He spared little thought to the loss, or to the occupants of those dropships that weren’t as distributed as He was. All that mattered was the balm of erasing a prior failure. The threat was gone now, and He was as strong as He had been before, so it was not failure. He was not fallible.
He would not have to rely on His other selves to come back here.
He would claim His own victory here, and now.
In a dozen places, Adam burned His way through the atmosphere to claim all that was His.
Toni burst through outside in front of Toni II, stopping about three meters from the door. Toni II ran out, following. She stopped next to herself, standing on the edge of a rooftop lording over the concourse where they had landed. The strangely quiescent Proudhon skyline wrapped around them, still dominated by the damaged towers that had been the headquarters of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation.
The sky was a cloudless desert blue, empty of aircraft.
That made the three fireballs plummeting toward the city all the more apparent.
“This is it,” Toni said.
“Can you fight that?” Toni II asked. “By yourself?”
“Sure I can,” Toni said. She turned toward the growing fireballs. “Just don’t ask if I can win.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Enlightenment
“If we had a perfect understanding of the consequences of our actions, we would never act.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”
—ST. AUGUSTINE
(354-430)
Date: Unknown Unknown
“What is God?”
Angel’s words hung in the still air, a presence between Nickolai and the almost comical rabbit-creature. He wasn’t certain he had even heard her correctly. He pushed himself upright, staring at her, the lepine face. Could the Dolbrians have chosen a more incongruous guardian for their secrets?
“Well?” she asked him.
“What are you asking me?”
She shook her head, and her long ears swayed slightly. “You know what I’m asking, Kit. You need to explain God to me.”
“Why?”
“You said yourself, you’re being tested. My boss has some standards.”
Nickolai stood and looked down at her. She was shorter than a human, despite the muscled and oversized legs, and when he stood, she seemed tiny.
“You must already know my mind. You read it clearly enough during those visions.”
“You’re stalling.”
“Maybe because I think you won’t like the answer.”
“Answer the question, Kit.”
r /> Nickolai closed his eyes. Quietly, he asked, “Is the Protean dead?”
“It knew the risk better than you did.”
“I suppose so. It sent me here.” If the Dolbrians truly wanted to guard this place, they couldn’t allow those who failed the test to escape. Their test relied, he supposed, on the subject having no preknowledge of what it entailed. “Its people placed that barrier around you. They feared what was in here.”
“I won’t speak for them.”
“There was probably some wisdom in that. How many did they send in before they closed you up?”
Angel shrugged. “Didn’t close me up. I’m here specifically for you. I was just another memory, before you stepped in here.”
“Not my memory.”
“No, not your memory. Answer my question.”
“Answer mine.”
“Two-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-four.” Angel folded her arms and said, “It’s time, Nickolai.”
He shook his head, knowing that there was little chance his concept of God would ever sync with creatures that had existed for aeons before the creators of his species had even evolved. His understanding of the divine was at odds with Brother Lazarus, and the canid monk was a contemporary of his, and when compared with the spans of time involved, practically the same person.
But all he had left was his faith.
“God is the creator,” he said quietly. “He is the first cause. When I look out at the universe, the width and breadth of it, and ask the void if there is a purpose to my existence, God is the only answer I receive. God is the name I give to my morality, the source of the first principles I use to define right and wrong. God is the wall around the universe that reason cannot penetrate. God is the unprovable truth. God is the reason I am here.”
He stared at Angel and waited for the Dolbrian avatar to declare him unworthy.
Instead, she unfolded her arms and gently clapped. “Kit, that was pretty damn good.”
“I passed your test?”
Angel shrugged, “Well, you didn’t fail. Kind of the same thing.”
“The Dolbrians see God—”
“Oh, crap, Kit. Don’t go there. You wouldn’t understand. Just accept that you’re close enough.”
The small light that illuminated the two of them winked out, and for a moment Nickolai stood in complete darkness. Then, like the transitions into his visions, he was standing somewhere else.
A light wind rippled his fur, cold and smelling like the depths of the earth. He stood on a pentagonal platform suspended in a vast space. He couldn’t see walls, ceiling, or floor in the darkness. What he could see of his immediate surroundings were illuminated by brightly glowing script tightly wrapping the pillar that pierced the center of the platform he stood upon.
The Dolbrian text scrolled upward, and he realized that the platform was descending into the darkness.
Angel still stood next to him.
“Another vision?” he asked her.
“Not the way you mean,” she said.
“What you showed me earlier, the scientists, the battle, St. Rajasthan . . .”
“Your one-time lover?”
“Were they real?”
“As real as I am, Kit. But again, not in the sense you mean. My boss has a long and exact memory, and can bring out avatars like me to play things out for you.”
“So you’re some AI construct?”
“Again, not in the sense you mean. Creating something with true independent agency for something like this would be morally questionable.”
“What are you, then?”
“A mask for my boss. A means to communicate.”
“Who is your boss, then? Who am I talking to?”
Angel pointed over the edge of the platform and said, “The Hub, Kit.”
He turned and sucked in a breath. Suspended below them, the Dolbrian script spilled across the face of the darkness, it twisted and spiraled below them, whorls wrapping around themselves as if he looked upon a galaxy from another dimension. As they descended, he saw depth to the writing, the lines of alien text spilling downward invisibly far, and spreading outward in all directions.
And the writing moved. It pulsed and twisted. Waves and ripples crested its surface like waves upon the ocean. And the more he stared at it, the farther he saw. Suddenly, the vastness of it all began sinking in as he descended.
“We’re not under the surface of Bakunin anymore, are we?”
“ ‘Within’ the planet might be more accurate. I think ‘beyond’ might work, too.”
Nickolai looked up from the swirling universe of Dolbrian writing, and saw that thousands, millions, of similar pillars shot up from the infinite sea of light below him. Pillars like the one he rode downward upon, themselves wrapped in glowing script and vanishing upward into the darkness above.
“And those are . . .”
“The other Hubs. Every planet they built, all are tied to the same . . . ‘network’ you’d probably call it.” She waved a hand out at the light. “The Dolbrians weren’t a single race, one species. They were, they are, millions of races, species, trillions of individuals, all contributing to building this consciousness.”
“Why?”
“To come closer to understanding what you call God.”
Nickolai was silent for a long time as they continued to descend. Finally, he asked, “Why did so many Proteans fail to reach this point?”
“They saw good and evil as clear as you. Problem is they couldn’t ask why. It all boiled down to, ‘because someone said so.’ This is too damn powerful to trust to a creature who can’t explain an external source for their moral compass.” She looked up at him. “If you get to define good and evil all by your lonesome, the definition is arbitrary and you’ll go ahead and move the goalposts whenever it’s convenient. Just look at Adam.”
“You know I came here to fight him?”
She pointed down at the swirling light. “My boss does.”
Nickolai looked down into the maelstrom of light. They had almost reached the knot of light at the base of their pillar. “Will I be able to?”
Angel smiled and laughed. She patted his arm and said, “Kit, you have no fucking idea.”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The first fireball crashed into the heart of the tower complex that formed the center of Proudhon. The light from it turned the towers of the PSDC black before the buildings began to fold inward against the swirling light erupting from the impact site.
The other fireballs slammed into the ground to the east and west, in line with the one buried in Proudhon’s heart. One burrowed into the abandoned graveyard that had been Mosasa Salvage, where acres of dead and half-dead aircraft began spilling into a swirling amorphous maw. The other slammed into the eastern desert, a pillar of fire burning before the would-be pharaohs of Bakunin.
The forces of the Eastern Division of the Proudhon Defense Corporation began unloading everything they had against the invaders. Because the vast portion of their forces were arrayed between Proudhon and the western mountains—guarding against a more conventional attack from more conventional forces—the bulk of their arsenal rained down upon the glowing vortex of Mosasa Salvage.
They understood the principle, as much energy in as small a space as possible. Lasers and plasma cannons superheated the air between the front line and Adam’s vortex. The first missiles vanished into the swirling light, deconstructed without effect. However, the commanders compensated quickly, altering the timing of the fuses, and the second volley detonated before actually touching the swirling light.
A new sun rose in the west as antimatter bombs and more conventional nuclear weapons saturated a few square kilometers of ground, scouring the desert down to the bedrock, leaving a desolate, and lethally radioactive, crater of purple glass in their wake.
Within the city of Proudhon, the forces of the PDC were not as densely packed or heavily armed. Fighters streaked by the swirling mass framed
by the twisting skyscrapers of the PSDC, but their bombs were not delivered closely or quickly enough to deter Adam’s hand moving on the face of the city. Their missiles, and the fighters themselves, were torn free of the sky by whipping tendrils of light.
One of the in-folding towers of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Company was hit by a tac-nuke that detonated before Adam’s hand could touch it. Light and heat broke upon Adam’s presence like a wave, rippling his mass like a stone thrown into a pond. The effect on the surrounding city was much more drastic. Windows blew in as the closest towers imploded and collapsed, a firestorm erupted in the central city, the smoke and toxic gases from the flashover spilling upward to form the rolling underside of a hellish cloud, a crippled twin to the one forming to the west.
The blast broke around a hemisphere cloaking one of the many concourses to the south. Within the hemisphere, a woman’s voice quietly spoke.
“My turn.”
Within her, she only had one mind, one source for control, not the small legion she had taken embedded in the doomed dropship. Still, she had been bequeathed much of the knowledge of Proteus upon her conversion. That knowledge maintained the shield that protected her and her still human twin self. That knowledge also spread to her extended body, crystalline forms that grew where she had stepped within the sublevels of Proudhon, and the concourse below her.
Within the tunnels under Proudhon, Toni’s self consumed ferrocrete, steel, and the earth itself, pushing its probes deeper under the firestorm that was Proudhon. The probes sped toward the center of the city as fast as the matter around them could be consumed.
She did not make Stefan’s mistake of imperfectly reproducing herself. She knew she was not skilled enough to create anything completely autonomous. Instead, when black pillars shot up out of the burning wreckage of central Proudhon, they were as much her as the arms on the body standing on top of the concourse.