Heretics (2 page)

The trio that returned to Procyon were long removed from the single mind they had once been. Their thoughts still overlapped, but they had long been more of themselves than they were of each other.

One third called itself Mosasa, a machine built in the shape of a man long dead, down to tattoos linking him to a spaceborn tribe that ceased to exist before the Confederacy had been born.

One third bore the name Random Walk and carried its Race-built brain inside a robotic body that pretended to be nothing other than a mechanical construct.

The final third was named Ambrose, who had been a spy in the heart of the Confederacy, the heresy of his artificial mind buried under the organic components of a biological body that had once been human. A man cybernetically rebuilt to the very edge of the Confederacy's taboos.

The three returned to Procyon as saviors, their program fulfilled, to release their creators from their bondage, to allow the Race to return to their rightful place in the universe.

They arrived two centuries too late.

 

The Race's aversion to direct violence arose partly because of the fragility of the environment on their homeworld. Their defeat taught them an evil lesson—direct violence could be decisive in the face of every other alternative. In less than a generation, those of the Race that took that lesson to heart annihilated those that had not. Another generation and those victors managed to slaughter each other, destroying the biosphere of their marginally habitable planet.

Mosasa's trio had triumphantly returned to a dead world.

Random Walk was the purest of the three, the one who had suffered the least change from when he had been built. With no Race to serve, there was no purpose to Random's existence. The AI Random Walk realized this, the electrical impulses in his brain flickered and died, and his mechanical corpse collapsed in the dust of his extinct god's world.

Five became two.

Enough of Ambrose's body was human that he had to carry a rebreathing mask in order to walk abroad in the ash-scarred air. His human biology had also bequeathed something else to him.

Rage.

Ambrose screamed at the empty world, howling at the caverns where the flesh of the only deity they had known once lived. In the collapse of his sanity he tried to kill Mosasa. In his blind fury he ignored the fact that Mosasa's neck was polymer, carbon- fiber, and steel, and his own hands were little more than imitation flesh and bone. Still, Ambrose attempted to choke the life from his cybernetic brother, crushing flesh both real and artificial, until blood seeped from between his fingers.

He screamed pleas and obscenities into Mosasa's face, blaming him for the death of the Race, for leading them to this place, for bearing the responsibility of the human being who had taken those five AIs from the wreckage of the war and resurrected them just enough so they could see the death of the only thing that had mattered. Ambrose blamed Mosasa for the purposelessness of the universe.

And the purposeless universe laughed at him, because Mosasa refused to die.

Ambrose released his brother and ran away into the dead wilderness, screaming for survivors. Screaming to find his creators. Screaming for God.

 

Mosasa searched for him, searched long after the rebreather should have failed, long after the organic pieces of Ambrose should have withered and died. He searched until he had convinced himself that he was the sole survivor.

Mosasa returned to his persona on Bakunin. Withdrawing to become an aimless spider sitting in the center of the information web binding human space together. He did nothing except slight moves designed to maintain the status quo of his new homeworld, the only place in human space where an AI like him could exist without facing summary destruction.

For another one hundred and seventy-five years, Mosasa did nothing except preserve the equilibrium of the world around him.

Then a crack opened in mankind's closed system. Mosasa detected a strange feedback coming from colonies founded far beyond the fringes of the deceased Confederacy, disruption in the expected motion of goods, information, and services. Effects without visible cause. Ripples in the human pond caused by the fall of an unseen rock.

A rock that must have been very large indeed.

A rock that had fallen somewhere near Xi Virginis.

Such a large unknown was intolerable. Mosasa was too long used to near omniscience. Even if something fell outside the range of his knowledge, the data he could perceive gave the unknown a defined scope, a limited range, a solid boundary. For every hole there was a border.

The anomaly must be described, cataloged, and made to fit into Mosasa's catalog of the known. But to do so, he would have to abandon Bakunin to investigate the anomaly.

 

When the
Eclipse
arrived at Xi Virginis with a carefully selected crew, Xi Virginis was gone.

This was a possibility that was outside anything that Mosasa had been able to imagine. Something he could not have conceived of: the absence of a star that, based on their observations from just before the
Eclipse
's last tach-jump, had been shining normally nineteen years ago. Orbiting it had been a planet that had been home to a colony of up to one and a half million people.

Upon their arrival, the star was gone, the planet was gone, the colonists were gone. No signs of stellar catastrophe, no stellar remnants, nothing. No significant mass at all.

For the first time in a very long while, Mosasa was afraid. For the first time he felt the crumbling of his false omniscience. Then, as the universe mocked his hubris with an entire solar system, the tiny universe of the
Eclipse
demonstrated his folly much more intimately.

He ordered a broad tach-comm transmission. The absence of Xi Virginis, and what that absence implied, needed to be broadcast to every center of power in the human universe. But, as the tach-comm was powered to transmit, it exploded.

One of his crew had sabotaged their only communications link back home, and in doing so not only destroyed the comm unit, but damaged the tach-drive as well. It was inconceivable. None of the crew he had selected should have desired such a thing.

None.

But it still happened.

 

On the third day of the sixth month of the 2526th year of the standard Terran calendar, the
Eclipse
tached within less than a million kilometers from the colony world of Salmagundi, the damaged drives hot and unstable, but ship and crew intact.

Just as the
Eclipse
received clearance to land at a facility where they could repair the damaged ship, the inconceivable happened again.

Tach-space erupted with the resonance of a drive an order of magnitude larger than anything Mosasa had known of before. The wake of the massive engines' arrival sped through imaginary space, interacting with the still-active tach-drive of the
Eclipse,
shedding energy and heating the coils beyond the point of catastrophic failure. The engines of the
Eclipse
exploded, rupturing the hull, and forcing the dying craft to shed its lifeboats upon Salmagundi.

 

The Caliphate, one of the human governments to rise in the wake of the Confederacy, had arrived in force to claim the lost colony of Salmagundi as its own.

To Mosasa, it shouldn't have been possible.

The presence of the
Prophet's Voice,
a carrier that was a fleet unto itself, went against everything Mosasa knew about logistics and the technological development within human space. The Caliphate should have been decades away from being able to come here in force. Any tach-drive, even one with military specs, was limited to twenty light-year jumps at a time. Military craft required logistics and support, and a presence every twenty light-years for resupply and repair. A single ship like the
Eclipse
could be retrofitted to take multiple jumps, but it wasn't something you could ask of a whole battle group, a whole fleet . . .

But the
Voice
was a carrier ship a kilometer long, able to tach a whole fleet along. Its presence argued for a single jump range in excess of fifty light-years, maybe even a hundred.

Mosasa had seen no signs, no leaked research, no evolutionary developments, no papers hinting at new breakthroughs. Its presence and capabilities shattered Mosasa's model of the universe even more thoroughly than the absence of Xi Virginis.

The Caliphate had a ship that could, potentially, transit the width of human space in a single tach jump. Every planet in human space was within tactical range of the Caliphate.

When the officers of the
Voice
took him on board and placed him in a cell, Mosasa had resigned himself to the end of things. He was an AI from the long-dead Race. The Caliphate would only suffer his existence so long as he could give them information.

But it wasn't the Caliphate that met him in his cell.

 

His executioner, despite appearances, wasn't human at all. The creature called himself Adam, but Mosasa knew him as Ambrose.

Ambrose hadn't died on the Race homeworld. And he had, ever since Mosasa had left him, planned Mosasa's demise with the same patient deliberateness with which they had planned the demise of the Confederacy.

Adam had seen the fate of all flesh, and unlike Mosasa, he saw himself as its successor. Adam was the instrument that would raise up those trapped in flesh, past the wall of extinction that trapped them. Nothing, not even his hated brother, would turn aside the redemption Adam brought.

Adam faced Mosasa, his brother, his devil, himself.

And on the fourth day of the sixth month of the 2526th year of the standard Terran calendar, the two became one.

“Those who predict the future are doomed to create it.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“And in today already walks tomorrow.”

—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

Lieutenant Toni Valentine woke up at 0600 Stygian Local time. The same time she had woken the previous 265 days standard. Just like the last 265 days, she unzipped out of her bunk and walked the long station corridor to the gym. It had been thirty days since she had bothered to look out the windows of the corridor. There wasn't all that much to see. The station was orbiting around one of Styx's Lagrange points, meaning that her homeworld wasn't more than another dot in the star field, when the rosy glare of Sigma Draconis wasn't wiping the rest of the universe ink-black.

There wasn't even that much to see of the wormhole, the nominal point of her being here. It stayed below her feet as the station drifted around in its sixty- five-minute orbit. Even if a window faced the thing, it would take a good eye to tell if anything was there. The wormhole was little more than a sphere of distorted space, showing a star field about twenty light-years removed from the place where Toni was. At this distance it covered about ten degrees of the sky, and its alien starscape was lost against the other stars, when it wasn't lost in the light from Sigma Draconis.

She reached the gym, and opened the carapace of the universal resistance machine. She tossed a towel over the vitals monitor and nestled her limbs in the padded confines of the machine. Belts drew across her body, holding her in place, and the top of the machine pulled down on top of her, sandwiching her in what amounted to a stationary suit of powered armor. The faceplate was still clear, showing the gym.

She stood up, and the universal machine responded fluidly, bringing her to an upright position.

“What program?” the machine asked her.