Neither of the Advocates took their eyes off the battle. I thought of the diseased pilots aboard their ships, consumed in nuclear infernos. I tried to imagine the variety of Augmenters, the wretched variety of their deaths. I urged Bezile to draw the pistol and shoot Orela and Julius. She would not. I offered to do so myself. She refused me point blank.
“We’re glad you could rejoin us,” Julius said at last. “The battle has taken an interesting turn.”
He motioned to a seat. Bezile remained standing.
“We had the advantage of surprise,” Orela said. “We destroyed many of the Augmenter ships in our first onslaught, while many others have simply fled. Their fleet no longer poses a threat to the Noosphere. But soon we will have exhausted our own ships. Perhaps now is the time for us to join the battle.”
Julius indicated the optic that was showing Elydia’s phoenix.
“We believe this to be their flagship,” he said. “It’s mortally damaged. Should we be magnanimous in victory and go to its rescue? What do you think, Prime Arbiter Adewoyin?”
Bezile’s hand tightened around the pistol handgrip.
Shoot them! I urged her.
She angrily warned me to keep my peace.
The Advocates began relaying instructions to the crew to intercept the phoenix. I felt the tug as the flier accelerated, heading towards the battlezone. On another optic I glimpsed the scuttle, right out at the edge of the fray. Privately I prayed that Orela and Julius were not aware of it: their flier carried enough weaponry to annihilate a ship ten times its size.
Shoot them! I said again. End it now!
Bezile cursed me for my impertinence, remained unbudging. Her reluctance to use the pistol was partly due to her very status as Prime Arbiter and her inbred abhorrence of killing any living creature, let alone the Advocates; but it was also influenced by an uncertainty as to whether such an act would be rational and volitional or merely the first demonstrable symptom of the Dementia.
We closed rapidly on the phoenix. A pair of escape pods issued from its flanks at high speed. Julius and Orela each framed one in a viewfinder on the targeting optics.
“No!” said Bezile.
They fired.
Twin pulses of light sped from the flier. There were two brief sunbursts. The pods vanished from the optics.
Bezile pulled out the pistol and levelled it at the Advocates.
“Stop,” she shouted. “Stop I say!”
Julius and Orela turned. And smiled at her.
“Up,” she said. “Up, or I’ll shoot you both.”
They rose from their seats.
Bezile had used the full power of her voice, and now the crew began to take notice.
Bezile marched the Advocates to the edge of the ribbed walkway, where the three of them could be clearly seen from below.
“We have an outbreak of the Dementia on board the ship,” she informed them. “You are to evacuate it immediately.”
A few of the crew slowly began to rise from their positions; most did not move.
“The Dementia victim is the Advocates’ steward,” Bezile went on. “It is likely that I, too, am afflicted. The Advocates deliberately infected both of us. They have lost their sanity and are no longer fit to lead you.”
Bezile kept the pistol trained on Julius and Orela. They were simply smiling beatifically. Neither spoke. There was no movement, no obvious reaction, from the crew below. They looked guarded, uncertain. Some had served the Advocates all their adult lives.
“If you continue to follow them,” Bezile said, “they will almost certainly lead you to your deaths. Take the scarab scouter and go!”
Again she used the full strength of her voice. Most of the crew had risen, and it was plain their loyalties were divided. No doubt the normal human urge to escape the tyranny of the Advocates’ command was in conflict with their sense of duty.
Then a figure burst into the bridgehead—Leanderic, naked, fevered, plainly in the first throes of the Dementia. He paused at the threshold, trembling, then mounted the walkway towards the skulldeck, moving with great leaping strides that were animal-like. Then he paused, as if uncertain, gazing down into the pit with wild eyes.
Almost as one, the crew began to hurry towards the levelator valves. The valves puckered open. Some of the crew hesitated. The steward gave a feral roar. Swiftly they piled in. The valves folded shut; their descent nodules blinked on.
Leanderic slowly turned his head. Again he began to climb the walkway towards us. He looked feral, a predator stalking its victims. Julius and Orela clasped one another in glee.
“You’d better shoot him,” Orela said.
“Before he does us an injury,” Julius added.
Then Leanderic’s face changed, as if a wave of calm had gushed through him. He stopped moving, took a long inhalation of breath.
“There’s little time,” he said.
It had to be Nina who had somehow occupied him. I intuited this to Bezile. She reacted promptly, ordering the Advocates down the walkway.
“Is this how it ends?” Orela remarked as we descended towards the bridgehead proper. “In one last betrayal?”
“Don’t talk to me about betrayal,” Bezile said. “You inflicted the Dementia on your own steward.”
We moved with great caution down towards the pit, Leanderic preceding us. Nina was barely holding him together; he was quivering, his face slick with sweat.
“Will you execute us yourself?” Julius said. “After all, we provided you with the weapon.”
“We’ve been longing for death,” Orela went on. “But it must be a glorious death, a death of drama and revenge. We deserve at least that.”
We saw the scarab ship veer away past the eye blister, narrowly avoiding a crippled Augmenter wagon-flier that was cartwheeling towards Earth.
Bezile ordered the Advocates into two seats beside the pilots’ stations. They sat almost demurely, studiously contrite. Very carefully she webbed them tightly in.
“Take the co-pilot’s seat,” she told Leanderic.
The steward obeyed. I could almost see the battle raging within him. Bezile ensured he was equally secure before webbing herself into the pilot’s seat.
She pulled down the neural hood and told the ship she was taking control.
“Set course for Earth,” she informed it. “Atmospheric entry at maximum speed.”
The ship absorbed this, then said, “Are you aware of the consequences of such a trajectory?”
It spoke in a perfect blend of Orela and Julius’s voices, though its tone was quite impersonal.
“Maximum speed,” Bezile repeated. “This order is not to be countermanded.”
“The integrity of my structure will not survive the passage. Friction heat will—”
“I’m aware of that! Do as you’re ordered.”
It paused. “We will all be consumed.”
Bezile merely waited for the flier to carry out her instructions. Julius and Orela started ostentatiously to whisper to one another.
“It’s a mortal sin to destroy life wilfully,” the ship told Bezile.
Bezile depressed its vocals and took over manual control, sliding both hands into the navigation sensitory.
Presently the ship began to accelerate towards Earth.
Orela gave a hoot of delight. “Splendid! A fiery death on the birthworld!”
“A glorious end indeed,” echoed Julius. “And no more than we deserve.”
Leanderic managed to turn his head towards Bezile.
“Take a life craft,” he said. “Leave us. There’s no need for you to sacrifice yourself.”
“My dear man,” Bezile said to him, “it’s far too late for that. We’re all diseased here.”
“You can’t be sure you’re infected.”
“Look at them. Look at them!”
She was indicating the Advocates. Orela and Julius were laughing outright at us, like children enjoying a spiteful revenge.
Beyond the eye blister
s, there was only the Earth.
• • •
Imrani teetered across the skulldeck as the ship lurched again. I could hardly credit that I was back in him, but there was no time to question it. Holding his damaged hands up, he headed out towards the spiralway.
The ship’s alarm was frantic, the air filled with the stink of organic fluids and charred tissue. There was no sign of Addomatis.
Imrani scrambled unsteadily down the stairway as greasy smoke snaked from doormouths and vent ducts. Though the corridor surface was level, I had the sensation that we were walking over a rolling sea; the ship’s gravity stabilizers were beginning to fail.
Imrani careered on, finally bursting into the bridgehead. Jagdavido lay slumped across the sensitories, his hands fused into them, dead eyes open, black blood from his nostrils bearding his narrow face. The status display showed that one emergency pod remained on board; it was ready for launch. In their haste to escape, Elydia and the others had abandoned not only Shivaun, who sat rigid at the controls, but also the womb.
It was free of its tangle of filaments but otherwise undisturbed except that a vertical indentation had appeared down its centre. I was certain it was pulsing. I wanted to go over and examine it, but instead Imrani rushed across to Shivaun. His immediate urge was to free her from the neural helmet, but even as he raised his hands his broken fingers reminded him that he would not be able to.
Then Shivaun lifted her own hands from the controls. She began unfastening the helmet. Her movements were swift, purposeful, just as swift and purposeful as he remembered them. She pushed the helmet up. Shook out her hair. Unstrapped herself from the seat. Rose and turned to him.
Her eyes were alive, a shine in their arctic blue. She smiled warmly at him. Came forward and enfolded him in her arms. He felt her mouth on his and responded wholeheartedly to the kiss, scarcely conscious that her lips were ice-cold.
When finally the kiss ended, Imrani stared at her in astonishment. Only slowly did the realization begin to dawn that it could not possibly be her. She was dead, truly dead.
“Goodbye, Imrani,” she said fondly, and the light fled from her eyes. At the same instant I felt Nina joining us, flooding out of Shivaun and into Imrani while Shivaun’s body slumped to the deck.
The ship made a noise like a great bursting cough, and its entire innards heaved. Imrani was flung to the deck, the womb toppled over and the ship’s alarm announced: “Loss of atmospheric and gravitational integrity imminent! Manual exit escape pod primed essential urgent!”
It fell silent: the control cortex had failed.
The pod bay was at the rear of the bridgehead. We could only get through it by manipulating the pressurepad controls on the airvalve ourself. But Imrani’s hands were ruined. He was crouched over Shivaun’s corpse, blubbering. The womb lay on its back, pulsing, splitting slowly apart. The new Advocates were being born.
Imrani jammed his hands under Shivaun’s body, yelling with the pain. He lifted her up, began staggering towards the pod bay.
“What are you doing?” I cried out to him, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He carried her across the bridgehead, then lost his grip, slumping down next to the womb, Shivaun spilling out of his arms.
The womb had split open, and the Advocates’ bodies lay perfect within, their faces obscured by a milky mucus which coated them from head to toe. Their eyes remained closed.
And then Chloe and Lucian swamped our minds with their presence, telling us that they did not yet have any mentality and that we would have to inhabit them if we were to save our own lives and Imrani’s.
“What?” I said. “Inhabit them? How is this possible? They’ve only just been born.”
“Believe us,” Chloe said. “You can do it. You must save them!” The ship shrieked, and the deck began to ripple again. The urgency of the situation galvanized us. Imrani, weeping, stretched out his broken hands, laying his palms on the Advocates’ foreheads.
He seemed to fall forward—
—and then I was looking out through a cloudy fluid.
It took a moment to orientate myself. I was lying on my back in one of the new-born bodies.
I could sense its physicality very powerfully: it enveloped me with its strength. I blinked and raised a hand, wiping the back of it across my eyes to try to clear the mucus. Imrani was peering down at me, sobbing.
I sat up, feeling the tenor of every muscle in the body, the rough touch of my tongue in my mouth, a taste of salt, the musky smell of the womb fluid. I was perfectly functional. Beside me Nina was also rising in the female form.
My vision would not clear, but I knew we had no time for contemplation. We raised one another up, then helped Imrani hoist Shivaun’s body into his arms again. He teetered across to the pod bay.
It was Nina who manipulated the valve pad. The pod sat open in the bay, and the instant the three of us clambered inside it announced that it was initiating maximum velocity launch. Something closed in rapidly around us and everything went dark. There was an explosive burst, and the acceleration swamped my consciousness.
• • •
Waking was a slow process, and I knew some time had passed. I had the sensation of something soft and wet being stroked all over my body, and there was a fragrant smell. I was being lathered, washed.
Then I woke and saw Marea, Tunde, Vargo and Cori gazing down at me. It was Marea and Tunde who had bathed me, I knew, before laying me on one of the bunks.
I sat up slowly. Nina lay on one side of me, Imrani on the other. Both began to stir, Imrani groaning, Nina opening her eyes. She stared at me with astonishment.
“Nathan?”
It was at once a query and a recognition. She looked exactly as she had done on the Noosphere, in the white room. As I knew I also did. Yet we now inhabited the new Advocates’ bodies.
I breathed in slowly, deeply. There was no trace of any other psyche apart from my own within the body, and I knew why.
I was its owner. The bodies were ours.
I searched for Chloe and Lucian, but was not surprised to find no hint of their presence. They had accomplished their task with the utmost cleverness, gradually leading us to this consummation. I could tell that Nina finally understood it as well as I. It was perfectly obvious that they had intended us to inhabit the bodies in the womb from the outset. The whole story had been a means to that end.
It was also obvious that Marea and the others had had no conscious part in it. They were staring at us with a mixture of awe, puzzlement and even impatience. Wrenched from the safety of their former lives to serve the purposes of the tale, they had been used just as much as Nina and I.
I rose, the bunk snuggle wrapping itself around me; I was naked beneath it. Nina did likewise, though Imrani, his broken hands swathed in orthopaedic mittens, merely lay there.
“Is it over?” he asked tremulously.
“Almost,” I told him.
“You’re the new Advocates?”
It was Nina who nodded.
I felt quite calm and lucid. Vargo had returned to the controls of the scuttle. I walked over to him.
“The Advocates’ ship?” I asked. In my own voice.
Vargo indicated one of the optics. It showed the nose of the flier flaring as it ploughed into the Earth’s atmosphere.
I had imagined it would have been over by now. Perhaps we had not been unconscious that long.
“We have to try to save them.”
This was Nina. I knew she meant Bezile and Leanderic.
“No chance,” Vargo was saying. “They’re well out of range. Nothing’s going to stop that ship burning.”
“There’s only one way to be sure,” Nina said.
I understood what she intended: that we attempt to transfer ourselves into them once again.
There was no question but that we had to try. To let them die now would make us complicit in their murder. Had the entire drama been contrived merely to bring us to life? Had it been necessary? Should the blame for al
l the horrors rest alone with Julius and Orela, or might there have been a better way to have brought us to our new status, one that could have avoided the suffering of others?
Neither Nina nor I knew whether it would be possible to transfer ourselves without Chloe and Lucian’s help: and they were resolutely absent. It might also be dangerous, given that we would be entering minds afflicted with the Dementia.
It occurred to me that Bezile and Leanderic might prefer to die with Orela and Julius. I said as much.
“Perhaps they would,” Nina agreed. “But they deserve salvation, if possible. It would be our first official act of charity.”
She said this as a simple statement of fact. Already she seemed to have accommodated herself to our new roles. In many ways she was stronger than I, and yet we complemented one another perfectly. As the Noocracy had intended, no doubt.
Marea and the others kept their distance and said nothing; even Cori was respectful. Already they were treating us as if we were no longer ordinary mortals like themselves. Only Vargo maintained his customary air of scepticism; no doubt our latest incarnation as the new Advocates was no more welcome to him than our previous manifestations. As a Deist, he might even consider us abominations.
Nina offered her hand; I took it. Together we stared at Julius and Orela’s ship, concentrating on it, unspeaking, yet as one.
I imagined myself in the navigation pit, inhabiting Bezile again. I closed my eyes and conjured up the image of her in the pilot’s seat as vividly as possible. But though I tried, no transition occurred. We were firmly rooted aboard the scuttle. In our newly acquired bodies.
There was only one thing for it. Without speaking, Nina and I left the bridgehead and went down the corridor to the shrine.
It seemed more forbidding than ever now that we knew its true purpose. But if we were the new Advocates, then it should hold no terrors for us.
Nina and I approached the prayer seats. I had an urge to take her in my arms and kiss her, if not out of love then as an ordinary mortal demonstration of deep affection; but there was no time for such a nicety. We sat down, lowered our hoods, slipped our hands into the prayer terminals and activated the icon. It was a small pulsing black star on a field of white. I focused on it, let it draw me in. At the last moment I thought I heard somebody enter the shrine behind us, and I was certain it was Vargo. Then the icon swallowed me whole—
Mortal Remains Page 32
