Messiah

  Even here He could see the cities rebuilt into more organic, rounded forms. Adam found the destruction and homogenization of chaotic human architecture almost as comforting as the transformation of humanity itself. Even though there was a long journey ahead of Him, now that man’s cradle had accepted His salvation from the flesh, He knew that the final victory was His.

  His creators would not have died in vain. They were the architects of life’s final victory over entropy, over the Abyss. Adam’s chosen would endure for eternity, transcending the Race, transcending Humanity, transcending even the ancient Dolbrians.

  In the midst of the remade cities below, His chosen had built massive arrays of tach-receivers and transmitters, massive ears and eyes that saw deeply into the space around Him. Through them, He received news from other worlds that had accepted His word; Khamsin, Occisis, Cynos, Dakota, Haven, Acheron, Ecdemi, Paschal...

  He also could hear from the planets that had yet to receive His glory. He could hear the unfortunate chaos and panic that gripped the ignorant in the face of any great change.

  But there was something else. Something troubling.

  He had not thought of Bakunin since He had defeated His Nemesis, Mosasa. The planet was irrelevant. Even the dim eyes of His resurrected AIs could have seen that the planet would collapse into chaos as soon as Mosasa’s influence was removed. Bakunin couldn’t maintain stability for more than a month without intervention. The planet’s energy would be consumed by civil war and could be safely ignored in favor of planets with fleets and coherent states that might oppose Him.

  Even the mass of refugees taching into Bakunin’s system should only contribute to the chaos and confusion. By now, those ships should be cannibalizing themselves over too-limited resources . . .

  But now Adam focused His awareness upon what He saw and heard from Bakunin. The refugee fleet, denied the surface of the planet, was not consuming itself as it should. The fragments of data His tach-receivers pulled from the ether told Him that they were, in fact, stratifying, forming organizational structures.

  He now realized that the transmission from Khamsin had contaminated the social equation. A small variable that only slightly moved the stable planets of human space caused a major realignment in the shifting sands of Bakunin. It was an oversight He would have to deal with.

  He ordered all His chosen who remained in orbit to rally at the Voice, as the massive kilometer-long carrier prepared to make the tach-jump to Bakunin.

  Date: 2526.8.7 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The more meetings he attended, the more disheartened Mallory became. He sat at a long table with a dozen other people in a conference room in one of the Wisconsin’s endless series of luxury hotels. The table itself was lit by an elaborate fixture dangling from the ceiling that doubled as a holo projector, though no one seemed to have bothered to put such a presentation together. The light from it bore down on the people seated here, the glare making it appear to Mallory that the participants at this table argued with each other while surrounded by an abyss.

  Mallory rubbed his eyes. Stress, lack of sleep, or his overdriving implants made him sensitive to the light. Even so, the metaphor was too apt.

  “We need as many ships as possible under our banner.” The speaker was a thin man named Eric Tito. He was the nominal leader of the Bakunin native fleet. He was an unrepentant pirate and looked the part, down to a prominent scar on his cheek and the habit of carrying three sidearms.

  Leaning across the table to shout at Tito was a white-haired retired general from Cynos who probably held the highest military rank of anyone here—though it was a rank in a military force that might not exist anymore. General Lafayette said, “I maintain that our forces will not join with a nation that attacked us without provocation.”

  “We were under attack!” protested the lone Caliphate representative. “We defended ourselves from an unknown enemy.”

  “By attacking us?” The general shook his head. “That is unacceptable. We will not join with the Caliphate.”

  Mallory slammed his fist on the table and said, “The Caliphate no longer exists!”

  Everyone turned to look at him. He kept his fist clenched to keep his hand from shaking. He stood up and leaned forward. “You’ve seen the transmission from Khamsin?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “By now that scenario has played out on Cynos as well. Do you realize that?”

  “You don’t know—”

  “And Occisis, and Earth,” he slammed the table again, “and eventually here.” He unwittingly found himself quoting Mosasa, “If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it’s this!”

  Everyone at the table stared at him, and after a few moments of silence, the woman from the larger of the Indi groups said, “Perhaps it is wise to take a break for a couple of hours?” The general started to object, but an ally of his, from one of the smaller Indi groups, placed his hand on his shoulder and said, “I second that idea.”

  After a few more perfunctory comments, everyone nodded and began filing out of the conference room. Mallory was the last to leave.

  I need to hold myself together . . .

  He eased back into his seat and looked at the too-bright light. “God grant me the strength and wisdom to do your will,” he prayed, “however imperfect an instrument I might be.”

  He told himself that maybe, during the break, he could get some rest. He rubbed his eyes and swore that tonight he would force himself to get a good night’s sleep.

  He was the last to leave the room, and Toni met him. She opened her mouth, probably to tell him how bad he looked, but seemed to think better of it. Instead, she sighed and forced a smile.

  “Please tell me it’s good news.” He prayed that someone had rounded up Karl’s son. The young man had two missing people to his credit, and the fact that Mallory had brought the man to the Wisconsin had done a lot to poison what credibility he had outside his own group of Centauri ships. Mallory might have starred in a broadcast by the pope, but that had little sway with the Buddhists and Hindus making up the larger part of the Indi fleets that, just by dint of sheer numbers, were going to determine the course of Bakunin’s defense whether or not folks from Sirius, Centauri, or the Caliphate wanted to admit it.

  “I think it is,” Toni said. “Alexander Shane’s regained consciousness.”

  Mallory had a brief episode of disorientation. The reference to Shane was so distant from his here-and-now that he had to think for a moment even to remember who he was. Eventually his fatigued brain managed to pull the threads of Shane’s existence from the disorganized mess of his other thoughts. “He’s talking?”

  “I just had a contact from the hospital. He wants to talk to you.”

  He had allowed Parvi to take an expedition to the surface because of things Shane had said in a half-delirium. If Shane was awake, Mallory could question the man directly, and gain at least some idea of what he had been trying to tell everyone.

  “We have another two hours before this starts up again.” He shook his head. “And I’m not sure what I’m contributing at this point. Let’s go see him.”

  Going to the hospital required traveling to the Beta habitat, which meant taking one of the elevators up to the core and then taking another elevator back down. They passed by a number of armed security in Wisconsin blue, and in Mallory’s still-tense state he thought that the guards were more for reassurance than anything else. The majority didn’t appear to be looking around with any purpose, and they only paid attention to him and Toni so far as to check the IDs they’d been issued.

  It sank in that the normal operation of this place probably only ever required a nominal security force, probably smaller than the number of guards just assigned within the hotel where they were meeting. The majority of these blue-suited guards must be operations employees with little or no training.

  At each ID check, Mallory got the bad feeling that they were relying on security thro
ugh bureaucracy.

  The Beta habitat was denser with buildings, and had much less landscaping than the habitat they had left. Not a place for tourists.

  The hospital was a stark blocky structure placed in the center of a cluster of administration buildings. If he ignored the multiple reflections of Kropotkin above him, it could have been on any planet in human space, there was so little to distinguish it.

  Alexander Shane was in a semi-private room with the still-unconscious Abbas. The blue-jumpsuited guard outside the room was an uncomfortable reminder that Stefan was still loose somewhere with a cache of weapons.

  Inside, lying on a bed with tubes and wires running into him, Shane looked more than ever like a frail old man. The stark lighting in the room shone off his naked scalp, making his skin paler and the tattoos much more pronounced.

  “Father Mallory,” he greeted them, his voice less frail than his body. “Who is your friend?”

  “L—Captain Toni Valentine,” she answered him.

  He smiled slightly. “That’s a Stygian accent, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She glanced at Mallory and said, “I thought your planet had no contact with anyone.”

  “It didn’t,” Shane said. “It just happens that Dr. Pak made a hobby of collecting accents.”

  Mallory didn’t want to be reminded of the mental rape Shane had been a party to. “You wanted to speak to me?”

  Shane nodded. “According to the staff here, you seem to be in charge.”

  “That’s overly generous.” Mallory rubbed his temple.

  “I know how disturbing this is for you,” Shane said.

  “No, you—” Mallory sighed. “Of course you do.”

  “What is it you wanted to talk about?” Toni asked him.

  “The Dolbrians,” Shane said.

  “The Dolbrians,” Valentine repeated.

  “You know that Bakunin has the most extensive set of Dolbrian ruins ever discovered, because of the unique geology of the planet, being tectonically stable for millions of years. The quiescent nature of Bakunin’s crust makes it all the more likely that there is still some physical access to other things the Dolbrians left behind.”

  “What other things?”

  “What is the key mystery the Dolbrians left behind?”

  Mallory sighed. “Why they disappeared.”

  Shane shook his head. “That’s the common answer, the one you gave your students. But that’s the wrong question. All existence is impermanence. The question is not ‘why they are gone?’ The question is ‘why did they leave these planets behind?’ ”

  “What do you mean?” Mallory thought back to his xenoarchaeology courses in graduate school, and thought of the theories he had read; the terraformed planets were part of a colonization effort; or they were some sort of art form; or that the planets were naturally inhabitable and the ancient Dolbrians were there by coincidence.

  “You’ve seen Adam, and the Protean, two sides of the same coin. That technology was the result of less than fifty thousand years of our evolution as a species. Just by dating the few artifacts and seeing the spread in time between them, the Dolbrians were active for at least fifty times as long.”

  “So?”

  “They had no need for ‘habitable’ planets. They had lived long past the point where they must have been able to adapt themselves to any environment. Not only that, but the artifacts they left almost universally draw attention to themselves and the fact that these planets exist. Dr. Pak wrote a paper analyzing the content of all known Dolbrian writing. All of it relates to these planets or their locations. And, regardless of the relative dates of these artifacts, the script left behind shows no variation. His conclusion was that what we have left of the Dolbrians’ language is one of two things. It’s either a synthetic language or—”

  “Or it’s a sacred language.”

  Shane smiled. “I forgot you were familiar with the theory. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who knew what.” He raised a bony arm to press against his forehead. “Like the Latin of the Bible, the Arabic of the Koran, the Hebrew of the Torah . . . it’s a common enough explanation. The Dolbrians created habitable planets as a form of worship. That idea is the core of the Dolbrian cult that has nominal caretaking duties for the ruins on Bakunin. It almost makes sense that the majority of the cult comes from the Fifteen Worlds—” Shane broke off for some unhealthy semi-liquid coughing.

  “You were going to explain,” Mallory said.

  “Sorry, thoughts going around in circles. Things are still merging. But think; if these planets are an act of faith, would they be all there is to it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the act of creation is a sacrament to the Dolbrians, what are they trying to create?”

  Mallory narrowed his brows. “You haven’t become a Dolbrian cultist, have you? They didn’t create us. The latest signs of them not only predate hominids, but most mammals.”

  “No, but by seeding hundreds of planets, they knew that something like us was inevitable. They certainly were around long enough, and ranged widely enough, to have a good grasp on the probability of intelligent species developing. What if these planets were left specifically for us to find? What if the star maps with their common language were messages for us?”

  “Great,” Valentine said, her voice carrying a bitter edge of frustration. “If there are any universities left after Adam rapes the universe, maybe you can write a paper on it.”

  Mallory placed a hand on her arm. “Let him talk.”

  “Why? He’s just telling us what we already know. This is a pointless exercise in academic masturbation.”

  “Captain Valentine?” Shane interrupted.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I ramble because my thoughts ramble, but there is a point. A strong one.”

  “Get to it, then.”

  “The Protean, the entity that allowed Mallory and me to escape Adam’s attack on Salmagundi, came from here, from Bakunin, hundreds of years ago. It survived some contact with Adam before crashing on my planet. It knew what Adam was, because the Protean was in some sense a mirror of Adam.”

  “And?”

  “The Protean told us to find them, the Dolbrians. It knew what we faced. It also, most probably, knew what the Dolbrians left here.”

  “What the hell could they have left here that survived millions of years? A bunch of pretty rocks?”

  “Knowledge,” Shane said. “They left entire planets for a race they knew would eventually come. That wouldn’t be all they left. If they were so forward-looking, they would have left more of themselves, their faith, for their successors. The Protean was telling us that it was our chance to defeat this Adam—”

  Toni snorted. “I guess you’ll be happy to know that we sent a bunch of people groundside with the Khalid, on your wild goose chase.”

  Shane sat up, dangling tubes and wires. “You did? What did they find?”

  “They ditched in the ocean,” Mallory said. “We’ve been out of communication ever since.”

  Shane leaned back down. “There is something there, I am certain of it . . .”

  They were running late for the resumption of the conference, stuck waiting for the elevator to the core along with a bunch of Wisconsin security personnel in the midst of a shift change.

  “That was pointless,” Valentine said.

  “It confirms Parvi’s interpretation of what Shane was trying to say.”

  “You mean those two ‘scientists.’ ” She managed to articulate the quotes around the word.

  “Why are you so hostile to the idea?”

  “I don’t like baseless hopes masquerading as strategy. It cost us the Khalid.”

  “That was one ship among thousands.”

  “One ship with a radically improved tach-drive. Would you sacrifice your one suit of powered armor just because you have an army covered with chain-mail and good intentions?”

  “We just have to—”

  The
elevator arriving interrupted him. They filed in with a group of a dozen of the blue-suited security personnel. None of them paid him, Valentine, or their conversation any mind as they chatted among themselves.

  Again, he was apprehensive about the lack of professionalism he saw. No wonder they haven’t found Stefan yet . . .

  “We just have to what?” she asked him.

  Mallory shook his head. “Go forward with what we have now. At this point it doesn’t matter if Parvi’s expedition was a mistake or not.”

  “I know. I was just telling you why the subject pisses me off.”

  Mallory nodded. His attention had shifted from their conversation to the group of guards here with them.

  They rolled upward, the apparent gravity decreasing, and the floor seeming to tilt with the Coriolis effect, as they neared the axis of rotation. The view of the Wisconsin slid by the large windows, capturing Valentine’s attention. She stared out at the stars while Mallory stared at the guards.

  “Even if the Dolbrians left something, why didn’t the Proteans do anything with it? How do we know it would even be comprehensible?” She snorted, slightly fogging the window next to him. “Even to someone with an advanced degree in cultural anthropology—”

  Mallory placed a hand on her arm and said, “Shh.”

  “What?” She turned around.

  One of the guards, across the elevator from them, was staring at a small comm unit and shaking his head. “Hey?” he called out after a moment, “any of you guys having trouble calling upstairs?”

  “I was talking to Harris a few minutes ago,” someone responded, pulling his own comm unit. After a moment he had the same puzzled expression. “That’s funny, no answer.”

  The elevator began sliding home, and then the lights flickered.

  Someone said, “What?” just before the elevator stopped moving with a horrid mechanical crunch and the lights failed completely. The elevator was nestled in the body of the central core, so the walls of the elevator shaft blocked the windows, and the only lights were from the telltales on the two comm units.