She didn’t know if she could.
Outside, herself said, “Please?”
Toni II finally answered, “Come in.”
The door slid open, and Toni pulled herself into the cabin. They looked at each other, and Toni II stared into her other self’s face, looking for some sign of a change, some mark showing that she had joined the Proteans. She didn’t see any, other than the fact that her sister was still alive.
Toni stared back into her eyes, as if she was looking for something as well.
Toni II shook her head and said, “You look good.”
“You look like hell.”
“Apparently it’s not particularly healthy to breathe vacuum.”
Herself nodded and said, “Neither is breathing plasma.”
Toni reached out to her, and almost involuntarily, Toni II flinched away from the touch. Toni’s hand withdrew, and a painful sadness crossed her face. “I’m still me,” she told her. “Whatever happened, I’m still me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can.” The words were hard to say. She could feel her throat bleed as she spoke.
“No. I’m sorry for abandoning you.”
“You didn’t abandon me. You saved us—”
“No, I’ve been abandoning you ever since we left Styx.”
“What?”
“I just took the lead in everything.”
“I let you—”
“Because you have the same stupid idea I do, that somehow the fact you came out of that wormhole, that you’re a ghost, makes you less of me. Makes you less of you.”
“That isn’t—” She had to cough a few times into her rag before she could continue. She was more aware than ever of her ears throbbing, and she didn’t know if it was her coughing or Toni’s words.
“Are you saying I don’t know how we think?” Toni asked her.
“I’m an alien here, this is your universe—”
Toni knelt down next to her, slowly in the microgravity. Her sister reached out and touched her face, and this time she didn’t flinch. “How does that matter now? How does that even make sense? We are far beyond the point where anyone except us cares ... Neither of us has a past now—not one that matters to anyone but us.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
Her sister, her other self, gazed into her eyes and said, “You haven’t lost me.”
“But you’ve become one of ... one of them.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have a choice?”
“Yes, I did. I chose what I did, freely.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to lose you.”
Toni II suffered a strange wash of feelings for her twin, and wondered if she was at heart, a narcissist.
“You should come back with me,” Toni said. “You are a part of what is happening here, as much as I.”
“What is happening here?” she asked her sister.
Toni took her to a conference room in the core of the remade Wisconsin. Mallory was seated at a table, and she wondered if she looked as bad as he did. He had deep bruises under bloodshot eyes, and his cheeks were threaded by spidery hemorrhages under the skin. His fingernails had all turned dark purple or black.
In the room with him were Alexander Shane, whom she had only ever seen conscious on a surveillance video from the Khalid, and Rebecca Tsoravitch, the woman who had greeted her and Mallory when they had emerged from the air lock.
She looked around the room, and only saw grave expressions.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “I thought we were winning.”
“We are,” Mallory said. “For the moment, we have.”
“But?”
“We may have driven Adam from this system,” Tsoravitch said, “But it was only once. Our forces are weak, and it is only a matter of time, hours or days, before more of his army appears. His ships are probably in tach-space now.”
“Then how do you intend to stop him?”
“They don’t,” Mallory said.
“What?” Toni II said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Tsoravitch sighed. “We can’t fight him like this continually. Our only hope is injecting our agents into his body. It worked here, but it came too early.” She shook her head. “At least that is the consensus of the body of Proteus.”
Toni II stared at all of them in turn, dumbfounded. They had won; they had beaten this thing back. It made no sense. When she looked at her sister, Toni told her, “Now you see why you needed to be here.”
“This is insane!”
Tsoravitch shook her head. “Not from the Proteans’ point of view.”
“You’re talking as if you’re not one of them.”
“Oh, I am, by the rules of their particular game. But that doesn’t mean I think like them yet.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Toni II cried at them. “Why would they give up?”
“They aren’t giving up,” Shane said. “But Rebecca is right. They don’t think the same way you do. Not even the same way I do, and my culture had more than a passing similarity to theirs. This battle here, to you, to Mallory, even to me—it was the endgame. The last stand. To Proteus, it was an opportunity to advance their plans a decade or two.”
“A decade—what?”
“Within Proteus, the concepts of individuality and mortality have eroded to the point that they are truly alien. They sacrificed an entire world of themselves as a feint to inject themselves into Adam’s collective. They fought this battle less to save this world, but to grant them the capability to disperse themselves and their pilgrims throughout human space ahead of Adam. There are dozens of worlds where he has yet to reach. Now, on each one, there will be Proteus, dormant, waiting.” Shane leaned back. “A few decades from now, just a moment to the Proteans, they will be in a position to do to Adam everywhere what they did here.”
She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.
Shane continued, “Proteus took this chance only because Mallory’s efforts earlier made it possible to overpower his presence before he could communicate with other selves.”
“Proteus has already started taching out of the system,” Mallory said, “They and their converts are going everywhere throughout human space, using what is left of our fleet.”
“But that means that—”
“He will win,” Mallory finished. “He will win, and maybe, sometime in the future the Proteans will overthrow his rule. But mankind, as such, will be long dead.”
Toni II looked at her sister and said, “So you are leaving me again.”
“No,” Toni said. “I’m staying here.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, trying to wrap her mind around the end of everything. “You’re saying Proteus is abandoning us.”
Tsoravitch shook her head. “No, they aren’t, we aren’t.”
“They’re leaving just enough of their force behind to make a credible fight when Adam returns,” Mallory shook his head. He looked very weary. At the moment he looked older than Shane. “I can’t even posit a viable counterargument. They’re right. With their resources, it makes no sense to focus everything on one point where Adam can concentrate all his forces. Not when they can disperse and slip inside all his defenses.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They even have the sanction of the Bishop of Rome.”
She looked at Tsoravitch, “How can you slip inside his defenses if he knows what happened here? If he’s expecting what you’re doing?”
“The one thing he can’t do is see into someone’s heart, and when he comes to the new worlds where Proteus is waiting, all he will find are people otherwise indistinguishable from anyone else. That, and his arrogance will convince him that when he finally defeats us here, he will have defeated Proteus completely.”
“Damn it,” she snapped, “Why can’t we defeat him? You’ve done it once already.”
“Even if all of Proteus stayed here,” Tsoravitch said, “we
do not have the resources to repeat that battle.”
“Then don’t repeat it. Find some other way. This bastard isn’t God. Stop treating him like it!”
Everyone stared at her, and she realized that she had allowed a note of hysteria to creep into her voice. Even her sister looked at her as if she had suddenly turned into someone else. She kept going, “You rebuilt the Wisconsin in what? A day? What else can you build? How quickly?”
“There aren’t enough of us to build and crew a fleet like—”
She shook her head, her thoughts tumbling over each other. “Not a fleet, or a crew, for that matter. What about a tach-drive? How big does one have to be to make an interplanetary jump—can you make one as sophisticated as the one on the Khalid?”
“Yes, but—”
“What Mallory did to his cloud, do it to him. Have small drives sitting out there, waiting, and when he pops out of tach-space, tach the SOBs into his ship.”
There was a long pause and, slowly, Mallory said, “They’d have to power up from a cold start . . .” The weight didn’t leave his shoulders, but from the way his head lifted, it seemed he found more strength to bear up under it. “But could you reproduce the Caliphate’s new control systems?”
Tsoravitch nodded, “We could do that, but it would still require a huge effort, and we couldn’t cover all the potential arrival points . . .”
“Just the likely ones, then.”
“And what about our people on the planet?” she asked.
The room went silent.
“What? What happened?” She looked at Shane. “You sent them down there. What happened?”
Shane’s face looked pained. “I know. And I now know what’s down there. I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand before joining Proteus—”
“What? What’s down there?”
Shane looked up at her with a hollow expression. “Death.”
“I don’t understand.”
Shane didn’t look her in the eye. “There is something, in the deepest part of the caverns. It is a barrier; something is enclosed within it. The Proteans have known about it for centuries, but in their time on Bakunin, no one has lived to pass through it, and they know nothing of what is beyond it.”
“Send some machine through, then.”
Tsoravitch said, quietly, “Nothing that passes though the barrier ever comes back out.”
She stared at Shane. He said, “They don’t know why the damaged Protean on Salmagundi would direct you there. They know no way in it, past it, or through it. If your friends test it, they will be lost.”
PART NINE
Deus ex Machina
“The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.”
—THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Meditation
“Security is only 100% effective when protecting something no one wants.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“When you’re guarding the front door, they come in the window.”
—MARBURY SHANE
(2044-*2074)
Date: 2526.8.12 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Their captors kept the four of them in a comfortable suite, and neither Simon nor Lazarus came to see them again. Nickolai told his fellow prisoners of the conversation he had had with Lazarus, such as it was. And he had told them how convinced he was that Brother Lazarus was lying through his canine teeth.
Despite what he had told the dog, it was not enough. Nickolai had had his fill of mysteries, and of holy men who were the gatekeepers. He had been brought here by the grace of God, and by that grace there should be no more secrets. It didn’t matter how profane or tainted Lazarus thought his guests might be; the fact that they were here at all argued for them.
Kugara and the scientists saw things differently. While they didn’t argue with the premise that Lazarus lied, their thoughts went toward escape and a resumption of their search through the tunnels.
Nickolai knew that approach would be doomed.
What they sought, Lazarus knew of and could lead them to it. He just needed to be convinced. And, instead of sleeping, Nickolai spun theological and moral arguments in his head, trying to discover the key to Lazarus’ thinking, what the dog needed to hear to deem them worthy.
That was almost a mental equivalent of wandering guideless through the dark tunnels under the Diderot Mountains. He was not a monk or a philosopher. He had been as mediocre in his religious training as he had been exceptional in the skills of a warrior. And his spiraling thoughts led him to a core of self-doubt that pondered if those deficits in his upbringing were responsible for his new understanding of God.
I know what is right.
If the Ancients had the foresight that Lazarus believed, if they were truly the hand of God in the universe, Nickolai was convinced that whatever remnants they left behind would be with this in mind, something like Adam. If the Ancients’ creation was divine, free from the hubris of Mankind’s creation of their ancestors, wouldn’t they have left them some means to know their mind?
Perhaps some way to call upon them?
That was it. It had to be. Like Nickolai’s faith, like Mallory’s, Lazarus’ had a defining moment for the end times. For the monks here, the end point of the current world was the return of the Ancients.
What if, buried in these caverns, was something that Lazarus believed would call them back? If so, Nickolai could now understand the lie, the reluctance. What kind of burden would it be to hold the secret of the end of the world, to have the responsibility of deciding when and how it would start?
Even if he didn’t share Lazarus’ faith, he understood the burden. If Nickolai had the means, how easy for him would it be to open the door of Heaven and allow the vengeful spirit of St. Rajasthan to descend upon the Fallen and the Saved alike?
He knew his job would have to be to convince Brother Lazarus that it was time to open that door.
Brother Lazarus had fasted and meditated since the exiled scion of Rajasthan had left his sight. He sat on the floor of his meditation chamber, facing the embedded slab of rock bearing the Ancients’ hand. He sought to empty his mind of all distraction, all the clutter the external world tried to pour into his flawed vessel of a being.
He needed to see the chaos around him, around the universe, with the perspective of the Ancients, where the distance of a million years rendered them all so much dust drifting though the tabernacle of the Ancients’ creation.
From that distance, did what Adam bring upon them truly matter?
The decision weighed heavily upon him.
He did not only protect the small bit of the Fifteen Worlds’ sovereignty on this planet. He also protected the secrets they had found here. It was disturbing, a sign in and of itself, that Nickolai suspected that there was anything here to find. However limited his knowledge, the fact that the Barrier was here, under this mountain range, was only known to six people. All of them resided in the monastery. No one who knew about it was ever permitted to leave.
Now it seemed, according to Nickolai, that the Proteans knew of the Barrier.
Did Adam?
Was either of them so much closer to the Ancients than he was?
He looked up at the rock covered with the script of the Ancients; the stone was passive, as it had been all the millions of years since the Ancients’ departure. If he had been of another faith, he might have prayed for wisdom.
He had three choices.
First was to do nothing. If Adam came to the Ancients’ world here, take that as enough sign that this Adam was to be their successor in the Ancients’ plan.
Second was to accept Nickolai’s sincerity, and take him and his companions to the Barrier.
His last choice was uncomfortable to contemplate. The first of his faith to come here and discover the Barrier had decided what it must have meant. It was a doorway to the Ancients themselves, a doorway that had to be protected from those not ready to pass through. They kept its existence
a secret, and to prevent its premature revelation, they buried explosives throughout the complex network of caverns leading to it. Every monk to hold Lazarus’ position had a detonator implanted in his skull. With a thought, he could seal the Barrier beneath a hundred million tons of the Diderot Mountains.
Perhaps it would be safe then . . .
But perhaps not.
And perhaps the Barrier itself would be destroyed in the process.
Was now the time for their return, and if it was, or wasn’t, did his decision matter? Was the decision his, or was he deluding himself? His faith called upon him to see in terms of millions of years; the thought that it all fell upon his head was the height of arrogance. He was nothing.
What was his duty?
His reflection was interrupted by a high-pitched whine. His nose immediately picked up the scent of vaporized metal and superheated rock.
He sprang to his feet. Someone was shooting.
He heard a cry, and the scent of blood mixed with hot metal and smoke. He ran for the door, his thoughts perilously close to firing the explosives that would bring the mountain down around them.
Through the doorway, he heard more EM rifles, one cry had become a chorus, and the blood he smelled now merged a half-dozen species. His hermitlike existence meant he had never succumbed to the local tradition of bearing arms at all times. He now regretted resisting that impulse.
In the hallway, he took one step toward the armory as Brother Simon ran around the corner toward him. He had been a native convert, and would have carried a weapon, if his right arm still extended past his elbow. He clutched the bleeding stump as he ran, eyes glassy and skin pale, obviously heading toward Lazarus even though he seemed unaware that his leader was in the hallway until he was almost upon him.
When Simon saw him, he stopped short, stumbled, and fell into Lazarus’ arms.
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