Prophets (22 page)

And he had let his flowers die.

The seasons turned again and the following equinox came with the associated festivals. Like the solstices, the equinoxes marked the time when pilgrims came from all corners of Salmagundi to visit the Hall of Minds. During the festival, the population of Ashley doubled, crowding with a press of people coming to select a new tattoo for their brow, and a new ancestor to merge into their own mind.

It also marked the time when those who had reached their fifteenth year since the prior festival were expected to select their first ancestor and become an adult. By then Flynn had been almost seventeen, the oldest child there to come of age, and the first selected to walk into the Hall of Minds. He hadn't the authority—or the courage—to refuse. All he had been able to do was choose which ancestor he would come to host.

“Here you are.”

Flynn turned and saw his mother standing in the doorway, facing him. He wished he had taken a glass of scotch. “Hello, Mother.”

“You're ignoring our guests. That isn't polite.”

“I needed some time to myself—”

“Flynn, you're by yourself all the time. You live out in the wilderness. Can you please be social?”

“They don't want to talk to me. You know that. I make them uncomfortable.”

“You can change that—”

“Don't start—”

“Come back, be a part of society. Isn't there someone—”

“Stop it!”

“You're rejecting the lives of everyone who came before us, their knowledge, their expertise, your father—”

Flynn stood up. “My father died eighteen years ago!”

His mother took a step back. Flynn could hear a few gasps back in the reception area. He didn't care any longer.

“Son—”

“Where was the memorial when the Triad jacked him into the Hall and diluted his soul to the point of nonexistence? What about you? Did you mourn him the morning when he couldn't remember what was him and what was a decade-old recording?”

“Please lower your voice.”

“Why? Everybody here knows what I think. Hell, everyone here is the same fucking person. The same tepid average of everyone the consensus made important.” Flynn pushed past his mother and faced the crowd, who was now all staring at him. “Here's a little game, folks. That same shocked expression you're all wearing, is that you, or someone you downloaded?”

He slammed the door on the way out.

Flynn had walked the winding path into the overgrown estate gardens for about fifteen minutes before the female voice in his head spoke up.
“You sure know how to make an exit.”

Flynn turned a corner and faced a secluded patio hidden by yellow-green foliage. A stone bench was nestled, almost buried, in a nest of vines, facing a long-silent fountain. On the bench sat a young woman about 150 centimeters tall, with almond-shaped green eyes and straight black hair cut in an asymmetrical diagonal. She wore the same black leather jacket, pants, and boots she always wore. She looked up at him and said, “And you know I don't like it when you call me Gram. It makes me feel old.”

Flynn shook his head distractedly. “Yeah, sure.”

She looked down at herself. “Do you mind? I waited until we were alone again.”

“No, Tetsami, you're fine.” He sat down next to the apparition.

His experience in the Hall of Minds, as far as he could tell, was unique. It was supposed to be a melding, a merging of an elder's knowledge and experience with your own. In most cases, it also meant the merging of those that elder had himself merged with, and so on, and so on . . . Achieving some sort of higher unified consciousness.

With Flynn, a combination of his own panicked resistance and his choice of Kari Tetsami manifested itself differently. Most people—most recordings of people, that is—downloaded from the Hall of Minds knew what was happening, expected it, understood it. Tetsami's mind, the oldest one in the archive, had been stored before Salmagundi had established itself, and before the biannual rite at the Hall of Minds existed.

If anything, the event panicked Tetsami as much as Flynn, and she escaped into some distant part of his brain. They remained two separate individuals. Flynn, and his twenty-five-year-old great-great-great-great-grandmother.

“Look,” Flynn said, “I'm sorry if it sounded like I included you in that outburst.”

“I know.” Tetsami patted his hand, sort of. Her visual manifestation couldn't actually touch him, though he felt it inside. “I'm in there with you.”

“Ever think it would have been better if the download went the way it was supposed to?”

“Hell, no. You know that creeps me out as much as it does you. I'm me, you're you, and let's keep it that way.”

Flynn shook his head. “I just don't know how long I can keep this up.”

“Standing up to their stupid ancestor worship isn't a crime.”

“Yeah, but it might cost me my job.”

Tetsami sighed. “I was kind of hoping that you didn't notice Robert was there.”

“We were staring right at him, you know. Only one set of eyes between us.” Robert Sheldon was manager of the wilderness corps, Flynn's employer, and about as conservative an example of Ashley high society as you could find. He was a lifelong colleague of Flynn's father—he would hesitate to use the term friend—and probably only allowed Flynn to work there as a favor. Between his father's death and his outburst, Flynn thought that Robert would have little reason to keep him employed.

“Come on, your father just died. Don't you think that's enough reason to cut you some slack?”

Flynn chuckled. “I know you're old-fashioned, but you've seen enough of things to realize my people don't see death quite the same way you do.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I've seen plenty of religions that promise resurrection. Yours is the only one I've ever seen that delivers.” She leaned back and stared at the sky, even though Flynn knew the only thing she saw was what his own eyes were looking at. “You'd think my particular situation would make me a little more sympathetic to them.”

“So, any suggestion how to deal with this?”

She turned and looked at him. “Ignore it. Either Mr. Sheldon will hold it against you, or not. Worst thing that can happen, you find another job.”

“I guess so.”

“I'm sure, if you worked at it, you could find something more important to worry about.”

Flynn looked up at the sky. The sun had set and the stars were just coming out. “I suppose I could,” he whispered.

Freedom is often simple ignorance of whom you serve.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

It is easer to meet expectations than to question them.

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Nickolai moved through the corridors of the
Eclipse
alone. The modified cargo ship was deep into its slog toward Xi Virginis. The star was nearly seventy-five light years past Helminth, whose scientific outpost marked what was supposed to be the fringes of human expansion in this direction.

Despite having the most advanced drives Mosasa could buy, the
Eclipse
was still limited to making tach-jumps twenty light-years at a time. However, Mosasa had retrofitted the
Eclipse
so that most of its volume was power plant. It could make the round trip without needing to refuel, with two jumps to spare.

Each jump took close to a month, despite being instantaneous as far as the ship and those aboard were concerned. It was the downtime between jumps that ate up time for the crew. For forty-eight hours the
Eclipse
drifted between jumps.

The
Eclipse
's engines were so large that, even with their massive damping systems, it still took four or five times as long as a normal ship for the drives to cool down from being fully active. While having drives active for four hours after a jump was technically dangerous, in those four hours it was far more likely that they'd be struck by a random asteroid than it would be for a tach-ship to suddenly appear close enough to cause so much as an oscillation in the drives' power levels.

After the cool-down period, when the drives were no longer active, the rest of the time was spent with maintenance checks. This trip was riding on the very edge of the performance specs for those engines. For the crew, they had been traveling for a little over a week, but the rest of the universe had aged 150 days.

The next jump would take them to Xi Virginis.

Mr. Antonio had explained the necessity of the downtime in the dead space between stars, about the maintenance and the observations Mosasa would wish to make. Mr. Antonio had also told him what he needed to do at this particular down period, once they had tached within twenty light-years of their target.

Nickolai pulled himself down one of the rear corridors of the ship, a maintenance area that didn't bother with the pseudo-gravity maintained in the crew areas, the bridge, and the one open cargo bay where the Paralian stayed.

Nickolai floated between cargo holds that held extra power plants for the
Eclipse
's long journey. He was going aft, toward the tach-drives and, more important to him right now, the tach-transmitter.

The ship was on a nighttime cycle, so most of the others who had no job to do were sleeping. He saw no one else before he slipped into the rearmost chamber of the
Eclipse
. The access corridor to the tach-drives was short, less than ten meters long, and ended at an observation room, little more than a widening of the corridor in front of a massive port set into the rear bulkhead. The effect made it seem that the corridor abruptly ended in empty space.

Several hatches lined the corridor, walls, floor, and ceiling. Several had active displays showing details of what was happening behind them, almost all the graphs and numbers low into the green.

Few meant anything to Nickolai. He wasn't an engineer. He glanced from panel to panel, until he found a display that was completely quiescent. Along the top, he saw the words Mr. Antonio had told him to look for: “Coherent Tachyon Emitter.”

On the wall above him was the access panel for the business end of the ship's tach-comm. Without it, the
Eclipse
was limited to light speed communications, effectively mute to the rest of the universe.

Before he moved, he checked back toward the door. Above the door was a holo pickup that should be providing a view down this corridor. “Should be” were the operative words. Two jumps ago, Nickolai had engineered his first sabotage on Mr. Antonio's behalf. He had taken a cartridge from his slugthrower, punctured the soft metal tip of the bullet, and allowed three drops of the clear liquid inside to spill into a junction box that served the optical cabling for the surveillance system. The chemicals in the liquid accelerated the oxidation of several key components, causing a hardware failure that was both hard to diagnose and hard to repair, and would appear perfectly natural in a ship this old.

The camera down here was still blind as of three hours ago. Nickolai confirmed that by standing on the bridge where several monitors scanned through all the security feeds. It was unlikely that anyone had gotten around to fixing it in the past three hours.

He just wished there was some visual indication that the camera was nonoperational.

Nickolai reached up and tapped his artificial claw on the button to open the panel. It slid aside, revealing the coils on the meter-diameter cylinder that directed the FTL particles that would compose any transmission. The coils were cold, idle, hanging about ten centimeters above the open hatch.

From his belt, Nickolai removed one of the devices that Mr. Antonio had given him. Like everything else, it resembled something other than what it actually was. To even a thorough examination, the small palm-sized device was nothing more than a personal Emerson field generator, designed to detect and absorb the effects of energy weapons within a specific range of frequencies, and provide the wearer a measure of protection from everything short of a plasma cannon, at least until the batteries overloaded.

It would be completely unremarkable until someone opened up the computer and examined the source code in the small device. Then they might see some oddities, such as the frequency sensitivity, which was set to wavelengths that didn't make sense in terms of energy weapons, or even in terms of normal massy particles. The settings only made sense when interpreted to involve the complex numbers associated with a stream of tachyons.

Nickolai slid the field generator under the emitter tube, back as close to the rear bulkhead as he could manage. According to Mr. Antonio, the generator would be completely passive and undetectable to any diagnostics. It would only switch on during a full-bore tach-transmission, and then cause a failure that would be nearly impossible to trace.

The important part wasn't how it worked, the important part was this act would be another step in clearing his debt to Mr. Antonio. Honorless as this sabotage was, Nickolai told himself that he owed Mosasa and his hirelings no loyalty. A demonic machine and a crew of the Fallen—honor did not apply.

He slid the panel shut and flexed his mechanical hand.