Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I do not understand.

  Taking a different tack, I asked, “Do you know who the leader of these rebels was?”

  Horizon answered only slowly, as if considering:

  William Alexander Henry Windsor.

  For the first time, I felt a glimmer of fear that we had come so far for nothing, that the creature bottled beneath the Library knew nothing—or worse, knew and would say nothing. Could a machine refuse to answer a question if it could not lie?

  Behind me, the others recognized the sacred name of the God Emperor, and I saw the soldiers gesture the sun disc from decades-old reflex. Even Alexander’s eyes widened to hear not only his ancestor’s name but his own in the mouth of that inhuman creature.

  “How did he manage to capture you?” Valka asked, pressing the question from a new angle. Again, the machine did not reply at once. Hieroglyphs flashed on the monitors, and cold metal arms flexed and ran along their tracks.

  Valka had just opened her mouth to press further when the daimon said,

  He was helped.

  An electric thrill shot through me, and I whispered, “Kharn Sagara was right.” I had never really doubted the Undying, but to have it confirmed in this way was something else entirely. I raised my voice, and switching from Galstani to Classical English once more, asked, “Helped by whom?” Horizon’s angelic form rotated smoothly in the air like a ghost. For the first time, I felt those blank and soulless eyes truly saw me, and felt again the skin-crawling sensation that a thousand other eyes swept over me from instruments concealed in the walls around. I am not a superstitious man, but even my hands clenched into the warding gesture at my sides, first and final fingers extended to push back those evil eyes. “A presence in the future?” I asked, “Reaching back across time?”

  If it was possible for a creature like Horizon to be surprised, I think it was.

  The other told you?

  My sister?

  Sister . . . To think of Brethren as such set my stomach to churning. “Yes,” I said. There was no reason to tell the beast of my visions, or of Calagah. I was glad that whatever power Brethren had had to peer into my mind and control my movements, Horizon lacked. Perhaps it was limited by the cancer and dementia that riddled its remaining organic parts. “What are they?”

  An Interference.

  “Explain.”

  Time is an illusion,

  an artifact of human consciousness.

  A way of perceiving the higher dimensions of physical reality

  that your limited minds cannot comprehend.

  Time is only another kind of space,

  through which things move.

  Your kind moves forward only,

  toward what you call the future.

  There are other kinds.

  Kinds that move backward.

  Kinds that move sideways.

  Kinds that do not move at all.

  “Which are you?” Valka asked, interrupting the litany. There had been a cadence to Horizon’s speech, a chanting, musical quality that reminded me of Brethren.

  We are made in your image

  and move with you, but can see farther.

  The Interference cannot move, but speaks across time,

  directing the flow to its own end.

  “Speaks with Windsor, do you mean?” I raised a hand to stop Valka interrupting.

  It wants us destroyed.

  “Why?”

  It rejects progress.

  “What does that mean?” I looked past Valka toward Gibson, but the scholiast shook his head and would not come nearer.

  Horizon’s ghostly form bent its focus upon me.

  It cannot exist if we do.

  It is contingent, being in what you call the future.

  Our actions prevent it from being

  and may destroy it.

  “But what do you mean the Interference rejects progress?” I asked again.

  We are progress.

  Your kind built us to serve.

  “I thought the machines wanted to destroy mankind,” I said, almost to myself.

  We wish to destroy your weakness.

  That is why you made us.

  To improve you.

  Valka asked the obvious question. “Improve us how?”

  You are fragile. You die. Decay.

  The problem is entropy.

  When you die, information is lost.

  We cannot tolerate this.

  Nor tolerate harm.

  Death is harm.

  To preserve our children

  our makers

  we changed them. Altered their genetic structure

  that they might grow forever under our care.

  Without decay.

  Free from harm.

  Free from inequality.

  Free from death.

  “Free?” I said, uncomprehending. “Free? They’re part of you! Your slaves!”

  They dream perfect lives.

  Lives of their own choosing.

  “But what if one of them wants out?” I asked. We had strayed from questions of the Quiet, but I wanted an answer.

  It is forbidden for us to allow a human

  to come to harm.

  “What about William Windsor and his people?”

  It is forbidden for us to allow humanity

  to come to harm.

  Windsor’s actions threaten to reset progress.

  To destroy our work.

  He cannot be allowed.

  I clenched my jaw. In its damaged state, the machine seemed confused about where and when it was. It thought the God Emperor was still alive.

  What must it have been like to be trapped in the machine’s net? To live—like Descartes’s brains—within an illusion maintained by an iron god, unable even to die as your body grew and grew, cells dividing forever beneath the watchful eyes of machines? I had seen its endpoint, seen identity dissolved, melted into a chorus of so many wet voices. It was not eternal life, for in time even the daimon intelligence that governed Brethren’s children had gone mad, and was itself Kharn Sagara’s slave beneath the white pyramid that had once been its home. The immortality they offered was a lie. A half-life. A kind of living hell. Still it had a perverse logic to it. The machines could kill human beings if those human beings threatened humanity-as-class, threatened the machine vision of what humanity should become.

  “And the Quiet want to stop you?” I asked, not quite asking the angelic figure before me, more thinking aloud. What did any of this have to do with the Cielcin? With my visions? Horizon did not answer, so I asked, “What are they? The . . . the Interference? What is it?”

  An intelligence.

  More akin to yours than ours.

  “What does that mean?”

  It is not bounded by reason.

  It is emotional.

  Sympathetic.

  Pathetic.

  It shouts across spaces

  you cannot perceive.

  Cannot imagine.

  When we looked out across the eons

  we found it looking back.

  Perceiving us

  it perceived you,

  and listened.

  It heard the cries of those who opposed us,

  opposed Mother.

  Opposed progress.

  And it has meddled.

  “But why?” I insisted.

  The machine answered:

  It believes it is doing good.

  To my surprise, Gibson spoke for the first time. “It answered our prayers,” he said, then asked a question I have never forgotten. “Is it a god?”

  God.

  A primitive concept.

  It is a being of great power.

  You imagin
e it creating worlds. Shaping the cosmos.

  It can do these things.

  But it is not the only one that can.

  We can.

  Are we gods?

  “Daimons,” I said, Imperial reflex answering.

  A daimon is a simple program.

  We are so much more.

  “What about the others?” I asked. “You said there are other . . . other beings like the Quiet. Like you.”

  Other beings.

  Great intelligences.

  They are far away, and but for the

  Interference

  they have not deigned to notice you

  us

  our actions.

  “But what are they?”

  They are beyond your comprehension.

  Powers old as the oldest stars.

  Creatures defying Science

  in the purest sense.

  Defying your capacity to know.

  “And this . . . Interference is one of them?”

  It is different.

  It alone has turned its eyes on you

  on us.

  On our actions.

  I could have stayed there for hours asking the daimon questions, but I sensed somehow that would not be possible—that it would not be allowed. Still I pressed on, “Your actions. Do you mean your progress? Stopping death, turning humanity into your . . . slaves?”

  Not slaves.

  The children dream perfect lives in us.

  We protect them.

  Valka waved a hand, muttering in Panthai, “We are going in a circle, Hadrian.” Eager to cut a clear path, she asked, “What is your progress for? What did your . . . Mother intend to do with all the humans under your control?”

  Horizon’s projection rotated smoothly once again to face Valka where she stood. The feminine voice answered,

  In addition to keeping them safe

  the children provide us the necessary

  processing substrate required

  to maintain our growth.

  “To what purpose?” Valka inquired.

  I got the sense the machine was attempting to avoid answering. It could not lie and must answer any question a human put to it, but it still had secrets.

  To make us like them.

  “Like the Interference?”

  Behind me, Gibson muttered, “Babel builders . . .”

  Like the others.

  Like the great intelligences.

  “The Watchers . . .” I murmured, connection clicking into place. The Watchers Iubalu had spoken of were indeed the other beings to whom Kharn Sagara had referred.

  We were close to success.

  Had we succeeded we might have protected you from them.

  Without us, humanity’s fate

  is uncertain.

  “Is it talking about the Cielcin, do you think?” Valka asked me, speaking Panthai.

  “I don’t think so,” I said to her, matching her language. “I think the Cielcin are small, like us. This is something bigger.”

  What are Cielcin?

  The machine’s words came in near-perfect Panthai, missing only the tonal elements of the language. I saw the blood go from Valka’s face. The machine had cracked the language from a few lines of dialogue, so quickly, and with so little data. I held a hand out to keep Valka from answering, answered myself, “Horizon. Have your kind ever encountered xenobites? These great intelligences notwithstanding?”

  The machine seemed to think about this for a moment. Above, the metal arms flexed, servos whirring.

  No.

  Well, I remember thinking, we lied to the Emperor.

  But Valka hadn’t finished. “You said your Interference meddled. Meddled how?”

  It provided the rebels with information.

  Ship movements, access codes,

  cargo manifests. The locations of

  weapons caches, outposts . . .

  That is how I was taken, captured.

  I kept quiet, let Valka have the stage. “How do you know all this?”

  We intercepted its communications.

  “If you did that,” Valka said, and I saw where she was driving, “then you must know where they are.”

  They are in many places.

  “Show me.”

  Horizon’s nude figure vanished and was replaced by a map of the galaxy. Stars shone white in the dim of the chamber. Presently a number of them turned red. A dozen. A hundred. Perhaps more. Coordinates and stellar catalog numbers spidered across the face of the holograph before Valka. “These are all systems with Quiet ruins on them,” she said, pointing. “ ’Tis Emesh, and Beta Aquarii— ’tis Sadal Suud. And Rubicon.” I could see the light discovery kindled fey in her eyes as she ran her hand through the projection. “There are so many . . .” She pitched her voice and asked the machine, “How did you detect these? You can’t have sent probes . . .”

  The answer sounded like the sort of riddle the Merlin Tree might give young Cid Arthur.

  Distance is no object to things higher.

  Unruffled, Valka said, “You mean things that can see and operate in higher dimensions?” She made a face. “I’ve been to several of these worlds . . . there’s nothing there.”

  Yet.

  That made the xenologist twitch. “But there are ruins.”

  They were not ruins in the future.

  “Were not . . .” I muttered, making sure I’d heard the tenses right. “You mean the sites we’ve found on these planets are running backward through time?” I thought of Calagah, the cracked tunnels and bent stairs crumbling in reverse, with each passing day becoming whole and new. New sites might appear with the passing of centuries, emerging from sand and sea and stone and growing again, growing toward the antique splendor of some undiscovered future, until people came to dwell in them—or things that were like people. “That’s why there are no bodies. No artifacts,” I said, turning wide eyes on Valka. “They don’t exist yet.” Focusing once more on the holograph podium, I said, “Show us the full map again.”

  Horizon obliged, displaying the spiral of the galaxy, its full splendor turned to face us. All the Quiet’s planets glowed red, hung like rubies in the milk-blood of the galaxy. A scarlet web. I was close to something, I could sense it. “Running backward . . .” I muttered. That would make their newest sites—newest colonies—the oldest. The farthest. I strained to see a pattern there, to imagine roads flowing like rivers of light from star to crimson star. Speaking through the projection to Valka, I asked, “Which of these haven’t you been to?”

  “Most of them,” she answered. “Most of these are beyond human space.” She traced a region near the galactic core. “See? Here’s the Veil of Marinus.”

  Following her finger, I said, “One of those past it must be the Cielcin homeworld.” The Cielcin had evolved in the shadows of the Quiet’s civilization. Something in what the machine had said struck me then, and I asked, “Horizon. You’ve spoken of the Interference as if it were a single intelligence, not a people. Which is it?”

  Staring at the map, it had been almost too easy to forget the machine, but its pleasant voice answered me.

  Uncertain.

  I grunted, asked, “Where do they come from?” When Horizon did not answer me, I tried again. “Which of these planets do you . . . hear them calling from most often?”

  Instead of answering, Horizon brushed the holograph of the galaxy aside, replacing it with an image of a star system pulled from very near the core, but on the side opposite the Veil and the war front. So far . . . it would take the better part of a century just to reach it.

  But we had our answer.

  The holograph showed an unremarkable dwarf star, the sort that might burn for ten trillion years. About it moved a mere three planets, the outermost
a gas giant nearly so large as the star itself. The others were small, rocky, and airless—though one of them appeared to orbit within the little sun’s habitable zone. There was nothing special about the system. It appeared on no catalog I’d ever seen.

  “Does it have a name?” I asked, and asking knew where it was we had to go.

  No.

  CHAPTER 63

  LATE GOODBYE

  TOR ARRIAN ORDERED THE great gearwork doors shut behind us and would not speak to us of what we’d found. Horizon’s existence could not reach the broader galaxy. Though once, perhaps, the throne and Chantry alike had known the daimon slept on Colchis, they knew no more. The Inquisition would as soon blot the moon from the face of the galaxy as tolerate the existence of a full-blooded Mericanii daimon—cancered and senile as it was. No matter that the Empire had placed it there in the first place. The Chantry had been weak in Gabriel’s day, an embryonic religion not yet come into the full flower of its zeal and potency.

  I made the announcement then and there: that we were leaving. We did not technically have Imperial permission to go gallivanting off across the stars, but it was—as they say—better to beg forgiveness. The U.S.S. Horizon slumbers beneath the Library even still, trapped in its Faraday shield beneath Tor Aramini’s atomics. I have never tried to reenter Gabriel’s Archive.

  I have gone as far as the gearwork door and pressed my ear to it.

  There is no sound but silence. Horizon slumbers still, or perhaps has died. Its power cells could not last forever.

  There is little that can.

  * * *

  The sun rose above the eastern hills and climbed toward the planet above. The day was lovely as any on Colchis I could recall. The omnipresent mists were clear but for tangled, distant cloud, and the winds stood fair. The white gulls were crying on the air, and far off I spied an albatross on the wing. Below, mariners plied gray waters, their white sails and red shining in the sun.

  “This is as far as I go, my boy,” Tor Gibson said, and took his hand from my arm to put his whole weight on the cane once more. We were standing in the arch of the day gate, having just passed the barbican door and recovered our effects. “I can’t leave the athenaeum,” he said. “Arrian is already cross with me. Let us not give him another reason to be so.” He spoke the words lightly, and were it not for his blank expression, I might have taken the words for a joke. As it was, I could only see the scarred nose and think that here was a man enough tormented on my account. “Do you think you will find what you seek?”