Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  “We don’t have too much translated,” she said. “But we know his name.”

  “What are you talking about?” William asked.

  “Our third unknown,” I explained. “We have three unknown heads below, three among four hundred and ten. Alleged bad record keeping.”

  “Do you know something, Mickey?” Rho asked.

  “There were four Logologists employed by StarTime Preservation between 2079 and 2094,” I said. “Two worked in records, two were in administration. None were ever given access to the heads themselves; those were kept in cold vaults in Denver.”

  “You think they screwed up the records?”

  “It was the most they could manage.”

  “It’s so cynical,” Rho said. “I can’t believe such a thing. It would be like our … like trying to kill Robert and Emilia. It’s sickening.”

  William uttered a wordless curse of frustration. “Damn it, Rho, what are you talking about?”

  “We know why we’re having such problems with Task-Felder,” she said. “I’ve really hit the jackpot this time, William. I’ve invited a snapping, snarling wolf into our corral. I apologize.”

  “What wolf?”

  “K. D. Thierry,” I said, the breath going out of me. I didn’t know whether I might laugh or cry. “Founder of Logology.”

  “You’ve got him down there?” William asked, astonished.

  Rho and I hugged each other and laughed, near hysteria. “Kimon David Thierry,” Rho said when we recovered. She wiped her eyes. “Mickey, you’re brilliant. But it still doesn’t make sense. Why are they so afraid of him?”

  I spread my arms. I couldn’t come up with an immediate answer.

  “The chief Logologist … himself?” William still couldn’t grasp the whole of the truth.

  Rho sat, put her legs up on the QL stand, and leaned her head back. “William, could you rub my neck, please?”

  William stood behind her and rubbed her neck.

  “What are we going to do, Micko?” Rho asked.

  “They’re afraid because they think we can access their dark secrets, hidden truths,” I said, finally articulating what I had known for hours. “We can look into Thierry’s memories, his private thoughts. They suppose if we go far enough, we can access what he was thinking when he wrote their great books, when he organized their faith …”

  “They know he was a fraud,” Rho said. “They’re doing all this because they know they’re living a lie. I can’t believe how cynical that is.”

  “They’re managers,” I said. “They’re politicians, shepherds of their flock.”

  “‘Cut the politics,’” William said. “Rho, you’ve stirred a snake pit.”

  “Ice Pit. Frozen snakes. Heaven save us,” she said, and I think she meant it as a genuine request.

  “‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.’ Matthew.” William seemed to surprise himself with this erudition. “Do you think Fiona Task-Felder wants Thierry disposed of?”

  “She may not even know,” I said. “She’s been given orders from Earth. All the puppets are dancing because somebody high in the Church of Logology knew all along where Thierry was, knew that he had had himself frozen by StarTime upon his death … That his cremation was a hoax, not to mention his joining the Ascended Masters as a galaxy-roaming spirit.”

  “Then why didn’t they outbid me on Earth?” Rho asked. “Why didn’t the Logologists buy StarTime decades ago and bury dead meat?”

  “You can’t buy what somebody refuses to sell.” I took out my slate and scrolled through a list of names and biographies, from public records and old Triple Financial Disclosure files. Any individual or group on Earth who had invested in Triple enterprises in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries had had to file extensive disclosures with suspicious and reluctant terrestrial authorities. Those had been the bad old days of embargoes and the Split.

  StarTime Preservation Society had maintained a wide folio of investments, including investments in the Triple. “Here’s my prime suspect,” I said. “His name was Frederick Jones. He was director of StarTime from 2097 until his death four years ago. Jones was a lapsed Logologist. In fact, he had sued the church for thirty million dollars in 2090. He lost. Did StarTime select its bidders?”

  “They could have,” Rho said.

  “Jones probably knew that K.D. Thierry was a member of StarTime. He might not have known where he was, since he took no particular pains to straighten out the records after the Logologist employees scrambled them. Think of what qualms Jones must have had, protecting the man he most hated from his own church …

  “To fulfill the contracts with Thierry, Jones’s successors locked the church out of the bidding, allowing only legitimate concerns. Jones had fought them off for decades. I’d say that eventually the church just gave up. There didn’t seem to be any scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. The heads were still just frozen meat. No foreseeable threat. New church directors came into power. Memories lapsed. Then they re-discovered what had happened. It’s all supposition, but it makes sense.”

  “I came along,” Rho said. “Pandora. Pandora of the tulips. What are we going to do, Mickey?”

  “Obviously, we’re legally required to defend the interests of the corpsicles—but I’m not sure under what law. Earth law and Triple Law don’t exactly mesh, let alone Earth law and lunar law.”

  “What about Robert and Emilia?” Rho asked. “If we’re forced to divest, what happens to them?”

  The QL Thinker interrupted us with a gentle chiming. “William, a comprehensible stability has returned. All cells are stable at one to the minus twentieth Kelvin. No energy input is required to maintain stability.”

  William stopped his massage. “Don’t think me unconcerned,” he said, “but this means I can get back to work.”

  “I haven’t even kept track of what you’re doing,” Rho told him sorrowfully.

  “No fear,” he said, bending over to kiss her on the forehead. I had never seen William more gentle, more sympathetic with Rho, and I was touched. “So long as I’m left alone most of the time, I’ll get my own work done. Save Robert and Emilia. This family is important to me, too.”

  I told Thomas about our discovery ten minutes later. He hardly reacted at all—the family meeting was to be that evening, his job was in the balance, and he was thinking.

  “The family syndics voted full confidence,” Thomas told me over the phone early in the morning. “They’ve left this matter entirely in my hands.” He had left his vid off. I interpreted this to mean that he looked too tired, too defeated to be seen by an underling; his voice confirmed my suspicion. “I wish to hell they’d kicked me out and taken over, Mickey, but they’ve got their own work to do at a higher level.”

  “That means they have confidence in you,” I said.

  “No,” he said slowly. “Not at all, Mickey. Think. What does it really mean?”

  I considered for a moment. “They think Sandoval BM, under your direction, can’t do much more damage than we’ve already done, and the other family syndics will work behind the scenes with the BMs and the council to patch things up.”

  “Give Mickey long enough, and he gets the answer,” Thomas said.

  “But that doesn’t make sense, not entirely,” I said, my voice rising at this sting. “Why not tell us to just butt out?”

  Thomas suddenly switched on his vid. He looked ten years older and exhausted, but his eyes were twin points of fever brightness. “I didn’t tell them about Thierry, Mickey. We’re going to try one more thing. You think the president doesn’t know why she’s been ordered to shut down our project. Well, why don’t we tell her? Better yet, Mickey, why don’t you play the cocky little bastard and tell her yourself?”

  If he had been in the room with me, I might have reached out and hit him. “You’re the bastard,” I said. “You’re a goddamned sanctimonious and cruel old bastard.”

  “That’s what I want, Mickey: c
onviction,” he said. “I’m putting a lot of faith in you. I think this will shock the lunar Logologists into a useful confusion. The leaders of the Church are counting on our not knowing; if we don’t know, Fiona and the lunar branch won’t know. Let’s upset the balance of ignorance.”

  I was still angry enough to keep my finger on the cutoff. But his words and his plan started to become clear to me. “You want me to play the upstart again,” I said.

  “You got it, Mickey. You’re angry. You’re insulted. I’ve just fired you. Tell Fiona Task-Felder that we know we have Thierry, and that we’re going to debrief his head unless they back off.”

  “Thomas, that’s … a little scary.”

  “I think it will knock Fiona into a stupor and give us some much-needed time. You know what the next step is, Mickey?”

  “We announce it to the solar system.”

  Thomas laughed out loud. “Damn you to hell, my boy, you’re getting the hang of it now. We could set the Logologists back fifty years. ‘Church seeks to destroy remains of prophet and founder.’” His hands ascribed lit headlines. “I think Sandoval’s directors are correct to leave this to us, don’t you?”

  I felt like a rat in a hole. “If you say so, Thomas.”

  “We have our orders. Sic her, Mickey.”

  I waited thirty hours, just to give myself time to think, to feel my way through to some independence from Thomas. I was not at all sure he hadn’t broken under this strain. The thought of calling the president, after my last defeat at her hands, was nauseating. I thought of all the poor idiots throughout human history who had been caught in political traps, logistical traps, traps of any kind; all rats in a common hole.

  I felt myself growing older. I didn’t see it as an improvement.

  And who was behind it all? Whom could I blame?

  Ultimately, one man—a man who had started a strangely secular church, attracting people good and bad, faithful and cynical, starting an organization too large and too well-financed and organized to simply fade, promulgating a series of lies become sacred truths. How often had that happened in human history, and how many had suffered and died as a result?

  I had dipped into records of past prophets during my Earth research. Zarathustra. Jesus. Mohammed. Shabbetai Tzevi, the seventeenth century Turkish Jew who had claimed to be Messiah, and who in the end had apostatized and become a Moslem. Al Mahdi, who had defeated the British at Khartoum. Joseph Smith, who had read the Word of God from golden tablets with special glasses, and Brigham Young. Dozens of nineteenth and twentieth century founders of radical branches of Christianity and Islam. The nameless, faceless prophet of the Binary Millennium. And all the little ones since, the pretenders whose religions had eventually foundered, the charlatans of small talent, of skewed messages too foul even for human mass consumption. To which rank did Thierry belong?

  I swung back from this dark vision, asking myself how much such humans had contributed to human philosophy and order, to civilization. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had ordered and divided the Western world. I myself admired Jesus.

  But what I had learned about Thierry made it impossible for me to give him top rank. He had been petty, a philanderer, a malicious prosecutor of those who had fallen from his grace. He had written ridiculous laws to govern the lives of his followers. He had been cruel and intemperate. Eventually, instead of going on a galactic cruise and joining the Ascended Masters, as he had claimed he would do upon “discorporation”, Thierry had been frozen by StarTime Preservation. He had donated his head to the ages, in the hopes of a purely secular immortality.

  I visited the Ice Pit and rode the elevator to the chamber. Stolbart and Cailetet-Davis had been recalled, finally, but they had left their equipment in place, since the recall was tentative, pending final decision for disposition of the project.

  Rho had been instructed in some of the fundamentals of the instruments. She could play back the recordings already made, and with some effort make crude translations of other patterns. We squatted on the steel decking in the near-silence. Then Rho cursed and fumbled her way again through the equipment settings.

  “I’m going to have to reinterpret some of this,” Rho said. “The translations aren’t perfect.”

  We listened to Kimon Thierry’s last few minutes of conscious memory. There were, as yet, no visual translations. The sound that came from the equipment was distorted, human voices barely recognizable.

  “Mr. Thierry, a … (crackling whicker) longtime friend of Mrs. Winston …”

  “We think he’s talking on the phone,” Rho explained.

  “Yes, I know her. What’s she want?”

  That was Thierry himself, speaking aloud, heard from within his own head: voice deeper and more resonant.

  “She’s asked about the (something) logos point meeting in January. Is there going to be an XYZ mind discourse?”

  “I don’t see why not. Who is she? Not another bitch from the Staten Island instrumentality?”

  “No, sir. She’s a platinum contributor. She brought her five children to the Taos Campus Logos in September …”

  “Just day-to-day business,” Rho suggested. She rested her chin in her hands, legs and knees arranged in a lotus, elbows on knees, as I remembered her sitting when she was a young girl. She looked at me with a be-patient expression; more coming.

  “Tell her the mind discourse takes a lot of my mental energy. If I’m going to hold an XYZ, we’ll need ten new contributors, each at the platinum level. Takes a lot of energy to contact lost gods.”

  Even through his own filter, Thierry sounded more than just physically tired; he sounded like a man trapped in boredom, mouthing the words with no hope for relief.

  “Can you guarantee contact with them?”

  “What in hell kind of question is that?”

  “Sir, I mean, do you have the wherewithal? Your health hasn’t been that strong recently. The last logos point …”

  “Tell Mrs. Whats-her-name I’ll have her swimming in Delta Wisdom, I’ll have the gods evacuate her mental sinuses back to her conception. Tell her whatever she needs to be convinced to work for us. We need ten new platinums. What the hell else have you got?”

  “I’m sorry to upset you, Mr. Thierry, but I’d like this to go well—”

  “I appreciate your concern, but I know what my strength is now. I rest … on my own theos charge. What else? Ahhh …”

  “Sir?” (Distorted.)

  A long groan, followed by sharp clatters, other voices in his immediate vicinity, one female voice coming to the fore, “Kimon, Kimon, what’s wrong?”

  No answer from Thierry, just another groan; something like plumbing rattling, fireworks exploding in a muffled room. The same female voice barely audible over Thierry’s final memories of a drastically failing body: “Kimon, what is this—”

  And Thierry’s final words, issued in a whispered moan, “Get Peter.”

  The translation ended and Rho shut off the tape.

  We stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

  “I can see … why some people would think this is wrong,” I said quietly. “I can see maybe why the Logologists on Earth wouldn’t want this.”

  “It’s a real intrusion, not like just opening a diary,” Rho admitted.

  “We should seal off the heads until they can be resurrected,” I said.

  Rho looked away at the neat tiers of steel boxes stretching around the curve of the chamber, at the Cailetet and Onnes equipment stacked beside us. “We have to have courage,” she said. “And if we’re allowed to continue, we have to work out our own ethics. We’re the first to do this. It isn’t wrong, I think, but it is dangerous.”

  “Rho, I’m exhausted by this whole thing. We could call Task-Felder and offer to give them Thierry. Let them have what they want.”

  “What do you think they’d do?” Rho asked.

  I shrugged. “They’d send him back to Earth, probably. Let the directors decide whether he should be …�
�

  “Released,” Rho suggested. “To join the Ascended Masters.”

  “He doesn’t have any descendants, any family I could discover … Just the Logologists.”

  “And they don’t want him,” Rho said.

  “They don’t want anybody else to have him,” I said.

  She unwound from her lotus and got to her knees, turning off the power on the translator. “Do you agree with Thomas’s plan?”

  I didn’t move or speak for a moment, not wanting to commit myself. “We need the time.”

  “Mickey, Sandoval has signed for the whole lot, a binding agreement. We have to protect them, keep them, all of them … and if there’s a way to revive them, we have to do that, too.”

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t think I was being serious, anyway.”

  “I wish Robert and Emilia had chosen another preservation society,” she said. “Hell, I wish I’d never heard about StarTime.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  I hate duplicity. Thomas’s plan was the best; at least I could think of no better. We were being forced to the wall, and desperate measures were necessary, but I didn’t like what I was about to do: play the clumsy innocent with Fiona Task-Felder. Smell like meat before the wolf.

  Again, I took the shuttle to Port Yin. I did not visit Thomas’s offices, however; we had planned things in advance two hours before I left, with contingencies, prevarications, fallbacks.

  The first part of the plan was for me to arrive unannounced at the office of the president, defeated and out of a job, straying from the established course of the elders in my family. I mussed my hair, put on a strained look, and entered the president’s reception area, asking in a halting voice for an audience with Fiona Task-Felder.

  The receptionist knew who I was and asked me to take a seat. He did not appear to speak with Fiona or to type anything; I assume she was simply notified there was someone interesting out front and I was being scanned by hidden camera. I acted my part with some flair, appearing ill-at-ease.

  The receptionist turned to me after a moment and said, “The president will have time to meet with you later this afternoon. Could you be back here by fifteen?”