Heaven's Reach

  He could think of several possibilities.

  Perhaps it’s too badly damaged to survive reentry.

  Or maybe its organic cargo can’t afford to spend centuries drifting through space.

  The awkward machine suffered dire problems. Metal-hinged legs began freezing in place, or snapping and falling off. Harry pictured a wounded animal, struggling on with its last strength.

  He turned to watch for the pursuers. A burst of light heralded their emergence, shining from the tunnel. Carpet strands quailed in response. Then the first creature appeared.

  Harry’s impression was of an armored earthworm, with a glistening head consisting of shiny plates. A beast of dark holes and airless depths. But this quickly changed. In a speedy metamorphosis, the entity adjusted to this different realm. Eyelike organs sprouted above, while pseudopods erupted below, until it stood gracefully atop myriad delicate tendrils, like a millipede.

  Or megapede, Harry decided.

  Only one kind of creature could adjust so quickly in E Space. One that was native to it. A sophisticated meme-carnivore. An idea—perhaps the very idea—of predation.

  As the first one transmuted to fit the ad hoc rules of a gigantic parlor room, several more crowded from behind, members of a hunting pack, eager for a final dash after their helpless prey.

  It’s none of my business, Harry thought, pulling anxiously on both thumbs. My first duty is to collect Wer’Q’quinn’s instruments. My second is to track and deter interlopers … but the memes will take care of this one by themselves.

  But Harry’s indecision was stoked by a sudden memory of the last time he had listened to the Skiano missionary preach its strange creed from a makeshift pulpit, beneath a slowly turning hologram of crucified Earth. With both light and sound, the evangelist sermonized that each sapient individual should look to the deliverance of his or her own soul.

  “Although our sect has burst only recently upon the boulevards and byways of the Five Galaxies, we are already seen as a threat by the old faiths. They try to limit our message through regulations and legal harassment, using unscrupulous means to undermine our emissaries. Above all, they claim that we teach selfishness.

  “If the Abdicators, Awaiters, Transcenders, and other traditions agree on one thing, it is that salvation must be achieved by species and clans, perfecting themselves to follow our blessed Progenitors into the Embrace of Tides. Each generation should work selflessly to help their heirs move farther, step by step. How terrible, then, if individuals, in their trillions and quadrillions, start thinking of themselves! What if redemption could be achieved by each thinking being, through faith in a God who is above and beyond all known levels of universal reality?

  “What if the Embrace of Tides might be bypassed, by achieving a heavenly afterlife, described in the sacred works of Terra? Would everyone then cease trying for racial progress? Abandoning posterity in favor of spiritual rewards now?”

  The Skiano’s lower set of eyes had flashed. “There is an answer. The answer of Buddo, Moshé, Jesu, and other great prophets who taught during Earth’s era of glorious loneliness. Their answer—our answer—is that salvation’s greatest tool has always been compassion.”

  Even days later, Harry’s thoughts still roiled around the incredible, many-sided incongruity of the Skiano’s message.

  Chewing his lip, he turned to address the floating P symbol.

  “How many hunters are there?”

  “The memoids number five,” answered pilot mode. “Two are now fully transformed and have resumed pursuing the mech interloper. Two are still shifting. One remains inside the tunnel, awaiting its turn.”

  He saw a pair of meme-carnivores accelerating across the pseudocarpet, each propelled by a million rippling tendrils, rapidly overtaking the decrepit machine. Two more finished transforming while Harry paced, wishing he had never attended the Skiano’s revival meeting.

  In fact, he could not be sure what motivated his decision to act. Compassion might have been part of it. But Harry preferred blaming it on something else.

  Curiosity.

  I’ll never find out what the clumsy-fool machine is carrying, if it gets gobbled up by a bunch of ravenous opinions.

  The fifth memoid emerged and began its metamorphosis.

  Harry let out a cry of resolution and punched a button, releasing the reality anchor, causing the station to plummet straight down with all eight legs deployed like claws.

  His first opponent fell easiest.

  A memoid is defenseless during transition, while reformatting its conceptual framework for a new environment. “Paraphrasing itself into another idiom,” as Wer’Q’quinn had explained during Harry’s training. During that time, its self-assured cohesion wavered, making it vulnerable to external points of view.

  This one reacted quickly when the plummeting station pierced its spine in several places, injecting some critical notions.

  INTERRUPTION

  HESITATION

  DOUBT

  In E Space, an idea can hold together without a brain to think it. But only if the proposition is strong enough to believe in itself. To such a self-sustaining concept, uncertainty was worse than a toxin, especially if inserted at the right place and time. Unable to cope, this complex meme faltered and quickly dissolved, allowing its component propositions to be gobbled up by the surrounding carpet. That left Harry free to amble quickly after its peers.

  Be like a spider, he thought, preparing the weapon console for action. His advantages were now stealth and speed … plus the fact that this entire subdomain of E Space must have coalesced a while ago around some seed-image from his own mind—probably a childhood memory of somebody’s Brobdingnagian parlor.

  Approaching the next two memes rapidly from behind, he chose to snare them with an entanglement ray. It seemed ideal for attack in E Space, shooting finely woven arrays of syllogisms—logical arguments collected from digests of the Great Galactic Library going back over a billion years.

  Well, here goes nothing.

  Harry aimed and fired.

  The weapon was contingent, meaning that its appearance and form varied depending on local conditions. In other zones of E Space, he had seen it lash out beams of caustic light, or discharge glowing disproofs like fiery cannonballs. Here, streams of distilled argument seemed to spiral out from the station like webs of sticky silk, flying over and beyond the next pair of memic carnivores.

  One of them stumbled instantly, snarling its abundant legs in viscous cords of ancient persuasion, tangling its torso amid strands of quarrelsome reasoning, rolling to a jumbled ball, then rapidly dissipating into vapor.

  Its partner was luckier. While cornered by surrounding webs, the predator managed to stop just in time. Wherever a line of caustic contention did make contact, burning its flanks, rebuttals flowed from the wound like fervent antibodies.

  The creature turned its metaphorical gaze, and proceeded to spit poison. Gobbets flew toward the station—presumably cogent explanations meant to convince Harry’s vessel not to exist anymore. He might have tried shooting them down, or swatting them, or even enduring the assault. But Harry had already chosen another tactic. Taking advantage of his knowledge about the local zone, he made the station flex all eight legs, then leap, soaring above the acrid missiles and beyond, over the pair of trapped allaphors.

  For several long seconds he flew, watching a sea of carpet pass below … so high that he began worrying about the descent, especially when his path seemed headed dangerously close to the glowing Avenue.

  I’m not ready for reentry here! The odds of surviving a random collision were not good.

  Fortunately, by making the station writhe to one side, he managed to just miss the shining tube. But landing came unbalanced and hard. Harry flew against the nearest bulkhead, taking a painful blow to his right shoulder. Worse, the cabin filled with sounds of something shattering. An alarm blared. Red lights flashed.

  Wincing, he scrambled back to the control panel, where
he learned that two legs had snapped in the fall and a third was badly twisted. His trusty vehicle limped badly as it stood to meet new challenges.

  Still, Harry felt aflame with adrenaline, baring his teeth and loosing a savage, chimpanzee snarl.

  Three down. Two to go, he thought, hopefully.

  Unfortunately, the next fight wouldn’t be as easy.

  One of the remaining predators could be seen just ahead, already pouncing on its hapless prey, tearing metal pieces off the giant machine, dismembering it with happy abandon. The other memoid turned to face Harry. Alert and fully prepared, its form had fully adjusted to this realm, and now resembled just the sort of feral insectoid you’d most hate to find crawling under the furniture—something many-clawed and stingered. He got an impression of savage joy, as if the adversary facing him was the essence of combativeness.

  Dribbles of foamy disputation frothed at the memoid’s mouth, then flew toward Harry.

  Leaping out of the way was impossible this time, so he tried to dodge left, then right. But despite desperate zigzagging, one of the blobs struck his forward window pane, spreading to coat it with a glimmering slime.

  Harry averted his gaze, but not before waves of apprehension flooded.

  What the hell am I doing here? I could be safe in bed. If I stayed on Earth, I might’ve had the company of lovers, friends, instead of coming all this way to die.…

  Regret caused bitter pangs, even though he knew the source was an alien assault. Fortunately, the emotion was diffuse, generalized. The memoid didn’t know what kind of creature he was, so its thought-poisons weren’t specific. Not yet. Alas, predators at this level of sophistication had remarkable sensitivity, adapting quickly to their victims’ weaknesses.

  Harry didn’t plan on giving it the chance. He triggered another entanglement ray, and once more his station flung webs of gooey argument. This time, however, his target agilely evaded the trap—perhaps by assuming some unique and unrelated axioms. The few strands that touched just slid off, unable to impeach exotic postulates. Only briefly inconvenienced, the memoid flexed its back and charged—flowing toward Harry so fast he could never hope to retreat.

  Its maw gaped, but instead of teeth there gleamed rows of pointy, spiraled screws, turning rapidly as the creature rushed to attack. The sight was fearsome and unnerving.

  It’s gonna board me!

  Harry reached for the weapons console, stabbing a button labeled DISTRACTION FLARES. They had saved his hide on other missions, creating dazzling displays of confusing data, like floating clouds of chaff, enabling his escape from even bigger monsters.

  Only this time the effect was disappointing. Clouds of mist erupted before the charging predator, but it barely slowed.

  When in doubt, get physical, he thought, activating the minigun. Vibrations rattled as high-velocity bullets launched toward the attacker, who reared back, bellowing and clawing at the air. But hope soon crashed as Harry realized the impacts weren’t doing harm. Rather, the creature seemed to snatch and grab at the projectiles, incorporating the material into its information-based matrix! The rotating screws changed color, from a simulated pastel blue to a dark, metallic gray.

  Harry shut the gun down, cursing. He had just improved the enemy’s chances of getting at him.

  The station barely shuddered when the memoid struck, clambering on top for a close embrace. A complex rarefied idea had little weight or momentum. But ideas could wear at you, and this one did so pointedly, chomping with those spinning drill bits, tearing through the vessel’s hull.

  Harry tried other buttons and levers, but nothing worked. Each weapon was dead, or else reformatted in some way the adaptable memoid shrugged off.

  In E Space, an object made solely of atoms could not stand for long against living ideas.

  Several dimples appeared in the walls … which then burst inward as whirling conical blades drilled through. Moments later, the screws began changing shape, taking form as little creatures. Mites, Harry thought, knowing that even little insects and spiders had parasites. The predator had figured out an excellent trick, using the logic of this subrealm against Harry.

  He stabbed a final button, meant for desperate situations like this one.

  Instantly, the control room filled with holographic images, a crowd of milling beings, mimicking various kinds of oxy-, hydro-, and machine life. A few slithered. Others walked, or rolled, or stomped, resembling some pangalactic, cross-temporal, omnireality cocktail party.

  A dozen or so mitelike invaders spread out, seeking the station’s conceptual core—Harry himself. The nasty little things flashed horrid pincers, while sniffing through a crowd of imitation sophonts. One of them chose an ersatz Zang to attack, hurling itself at a floating yellow blob that shivered when struck. At once, the hologram collapsed inward around the mite, enveloping it in a crushing layer of antimemes. The resulting implosion finished with a burst of light, followed by a thin trail of dust falling to the deck.

  They contain some real matter, Harry realized. These things are freaking dangerous!

  If one bit him, it might not just assail his mind. It could also chew away at his real body.

  Two more times, invaders got suckered into attacking wrong targets, and were destroyed. But Harry could tell they were growing more cautious. Gradually, the mites learned to ignore hydro- and machine forms, and began zeroing in toward his type of oxy-based organism.

  I’ve got to act first. But how? What can I do to fight my way out of this mess?

  If he ever made it back to base, he’d have suggestions for the crews who maintained the weapons systems. But for now, Harry saw just one hope … to shake the parent memoid off, breaking its control over the mites. That would also leave holes in the station’s hull. But one problem at a time.

  He didn’t dare take up manual controls which would give him away. So instead he called up pilot mode.

  “Yes, Herman?” the floating P answered.

  “Don’t hover close to me!” Harry whispered through gritted teeth. “Keep your damn distance and listen up. I want you to send the station jiggling and swerving about … random action … try to shake the Ifnicursed alien off our hull!”

  “That would violate safety parameters.”

  “Override!” Harry growled. “Emergency protocols. Do it now!”

  The scout platform began moving. Though hampered by two broken legs, it was not much burdened by the big memoid, whose total real mass was probably only a few hundred grams, even after eating Harry’s bullets. The limp even helped a bit, getting a swaying motion started as the station began shifting left, right, forward, and then spinning around, commencing a drunkard’s walk across the carpeted landscape.

  Despite its low inertial mass, the big memoid clearly did not like this. After all, movement was a form of information. Harry heard faint mewling sounds as it scrambled for a better grip, holding on to keep contact with its mites.

  Unfortunately, the zigzagging also affected Harry, pushing him to and fro. The holograms automatically emulated his movements, but he knew this would give him away soon.

  Through one window, he caught a blurry glimpse of the metallic machine entity, the big interloper he had followed earlier, who had no business coming to a realm where thinking made things so.

  It had already been dismembered, carved into several chunks by the last predator, which was now working its way toward the habitat bulge—

  A rolling motion yanked Harry from that dolorous scene, throwing him against another window. The one still coated with tincture-of-regret.

  Oh, I regret, all right.

  I regret not coming here armed with some real memic weapons! True wolfling brain poisons. Sick-sweet ideas that hypnotized millions, fixating them on just one view of reality, making flexible minds as rigid as stone.

  Harry felt sure of it. Even these local predators—lithe and supple in abstraction space—would turn conceptually brittle if exposed to the seductive reasonings of Plato or Marx or Ayn R
and … Freud or Aquinas … Goebbels or Hub—

  The station braked with a shuddering jar, splitting Harry’s thought and sending him slamming against a storage cabinet. He turned frantically in time to see several of the mites also come flying—propelled by their real-mass components. Two of them collided with holograms and were instantly destroyed.

  But two others survived to smack the wall near Harry. As he gathered his balance, he could sense their regard swiveling his way.

  Uh-oh.

  They had him cornered, with his back against the lockers. As the station resumed its wild movements, the mites approached from two sides across the bucking deck, snapping jaws and waving scorpionlike tails.

  Harry tried clearing his mind. Supposedly, if you practiced mental discipline, you could make your intellect impervious to toxic notions.

  Unfortunately, beings who were that disciplined made lousy E Space observers. He had been recruited for his credulous imagination—a trait these parasites would use to demolish him.

  “Uh … could I maybe interest you guys in entertaining an idea or two?” He spoke quickly, breathlessly. “How about—this sentence is a lie!”

  Their reaction, a snapping of pincers, seemed amused.

  “Well then … how do you know you exist?”

  Total contempt.

  Shucks, it worked in some old tellie shows.

  Of course, sophisticated memes would dismiss such clichés like flint-tipped arrows bouncing off armor. But what about a concept they might not have met before?

  “Uh, has anyone ever told you about something called compassion? Some think it’s the surest route to salv—”

  The mites prepared to spring.

  The station swerved again as the autopilot threw another gyration.

  Suddenly, a radiant glow flooded the window opposite Harry, filling the control room with torrents of starlight.

  Harry sighed.

  “Well I’ll be a monk—”

  Before he could complete the phrase, several things happened at once.