Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Low was too badly injured,” Francis told him. “Patience is alive and well. Are you and Marlowe well enough to walk—to run, if necessary?”

  “Perhaps,” de Vere said, standing up in response to the tone of Francis’ voice, having deduced that the question was not idle. “I weigh but a trifle here, and will not need more than a fraction of my strength.” Marlowe stood up too, nodding assent.

  “In a few moments,” Francis said, “you'll be free, and armed. You must get up to the surface and take possession of the transmitter that brought me here. Return to the orbital platform and capture it—there are half a dozen fearsome insects guarding it, and they might still be watchful, but you must defeat them. Raleigh and the golem must realign the apparatus and complete their intended journey. If you three do not have air enough, or have to counter further opposition, you may return to the surface—but you must be ready to defend the link in Kent, whatever it costs.”

  “They took our helmets away,” Anthony said.

  “I'll get them back,” Francis promised. “Do you understand the part you must play?”

  Anthony plainly did not, and Marlowe seemed uncertain, but it was almost as if de Vere had been anticipating some such opportunity with relish and determination. The earl stretched his limbs to test his readiness, then nodded; “Trust me, Master Bacon,” he said, “we'll take and hold the platform. What do you intend to do?”

  “This,” said Francis, unable to resist the temptation to show off—and walked into the wall of the cell. The determination to make a spectacular demonstration served him well; he found that it was best to use his new abilities as unthinkingly as he could, as if they had always been natural to him.

  It was the work of a moment to find Raleigh and his two adapted men. “Patience is waiting for you in the center of the galaxy,” he told the astonished explorer. “Be sure to tell her that Faust was not a traitor, if that has not been explained to her by the Ethereal accommodated within her. She will have made all the necessary overtures on behalf of your own hybrid kind by now; the rest may safely be left to the golem. When you come back, do everything possible to help de Vere secure the orbital platform—or, at least, the station in Kent. I can grant you a pause, but I shall be fully occupied elsewhere within the hour. Time is pressing.” He moved through the wall again before Raleigh could formulate a question, and found the golem.

  “Low and Faust are dead,” he told the creature, which had immediately assumed the familiar form of Christian Rosenkreutz in response to his appearance, “but Patience Muffet survived unscathed, probably by virtue of playing host to Aristocles. She might need the support of your advocacy if the Fleshcores are to be reassured. With luck, we shall be able to send you news in a matter of hours; it might yet be bad, but there is every reason now to think that the Selenite invasion can be thwarted, if Dee and Digges have done their job well. There will be no second chance to mount such an invasion, if you can do your part and I can do mine.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Francis reached out and clasped the golem's arm, hand to wrist, exactly as the golem had once clasped his. He knew that the golem would not understand immediately all that the clasp could tell it, but he was confident that the other would eventually be able to deduce far more than he had been able to divine himself. In the meantime, the creature would do what was required of it.

  “Who did this to you?” was the one question that the golem managed to articulate.

  “A Shadow,” Francis told him. “There are more steps on the ladder of Creation—or the ladder of Evolution—than you or I, or even the Ethereals, were able to imagine. It is, however, a ladder that all species might climb, given time and the will.”

  This time, when he walked into the walls of the Selenite prison, he initiated a moonquake that blasted the doors from all the cells in which prisoners were held, and stunned the busy workers in their thousands. By means of the exotic ripples he sent forth, Francis manipulated the lunar rock as easily as he manipulated the enclosed atmosphere, clearing the way for the captured individuals to make their escape, not merely to the surface but all the way to the platform orbiting the Earth.

  When the escape was guaranteed, he delivered the helmets and weapons he had promised. Then he left his brother and the others to do their work, and took flight.

  * * * *

  11

  Francis thought of what he was doing as “taking flight” because he had no other way to think of it, except for “folding himself” into and along imperceptible dimensions. “Taking flight” was the more pleasing analogy, if not the more accurate; it allowed him to imagine himself a member of the great legendary company of firebirds and sphinxes, hippogriffs and dragons. To think of what he could now do merely as “folding” would have demeaned that stature, and he did not want to do so. This opportunity to be a demigod would not last long, and he doubted that he would retain much legacy from it, or ever obtain another.

  “Now this,” said Lumen, his invisible passenger, “is exhilarating. Who would have thought that our nine dimensions were such a meager complement of the true complexity of ultraspace?”

  Francis knew full well that “ultraspace” was a mere linguistic contrivance—but some much device was necessary, if they were to talk at all. He would have preferred to think in terms of Shadowlands, or Immaterial Empires of Shadow Matter, but Lumen had been humbled by the encounter with the Shadow, and was not in an expansive mood. Indeed, it seemed deeply resentful that the Shadow's loan had been made to Francis, and that the abilities on loan had been so intimately linked to the latter's human consciousness.

  “Does that exhilaration justify your engagement in the game?” Francis asked, attempting to inject an acid bitterness into the silent question. “Will it make you the evident winner, and give poor Aristocles cause for jealousy?”

  “It began as a game,” Lumen replied, “but it became infinitely more serious, as all the best games do. All life is competition, all ambition gambling. You should be grateful to me, Francis. Without me, you would have none of this. You should be grateful to Aristocles, too—we might have been the provocative agents that precipitated this dispute into violence, but we are also the allies that have made it possible for you to win a spectacular victory. Had we and the Selenites let you alone, you might have taken thousands of years to reach this critical point in the history of your species, and might easily have been fitted for life in the True Civilization without any question or opposition ever being raised, even in the absence of a rebel crusade.”

  That was all true, Francis knew, but he could not quite bring himself to be grateful to the nascent Ethereals—who had, after all, been following their own agenda and their own whim, not even bothering to convince themselves that they were doing God's will.

  Ideally, he would have preferred to descend to the Earth's surface before taking a hand in the battle, but he did not have that option. Although the Shadow had lent him abilities that would have made him seem godlike to many a human being, he was still a prisoner of time and the intrinsic limitations of the ethereal plenum; he could not “fly” faster than the speed of light in any semblance of material form. The Armada was too far advanced in its course to leave him any time to spare—and John Dee's fleet had already taken off to meet it.

  Drake was in overall command of the fleet, with Philip Sidney as his chief lieutenant, but Dee and Thomas Digges had been the architects of its strategy as well as the vessels themselves. The crucial engagement, they had always known, would need to take place long before the Armada reached the limits of Earth's atmosphere, allowing its vessels to scatter. The Selenite ether-ships were already diverging in their courses, but they had to remain close together for the greater part of their journey in order to follow Earthbound trajectories that their fuel could sustain. Although the Earth and its satellite were only two hundred and fifty thousand miles apart, that was sufficient to reduce the bulk of both worlds to mere pinheads on a diagram drawn to scale. The Armada had to remain
more or less united for most of the journey, for purely practical reasons, and its commanders had doubtless made the calculation that it would be better to make what virtue they could of the necessity. In the first encounter with Earth's defenders, at least, they would remain in tight formation, endeavoring to smash through whatever formation the terrestrial vessels adopted like a battering-ram, forcing the defending fleet to disperse with tempestuous fire.

  Drake, in his turn, would try to mount a coherent and coordinated attack, hoping to reduce the Armada's numbers, with his own firepower, to a level at which the survivors of that first encounter might be too few to deliver more than a hundred cargoes of eggs into the atmosphere—which might, in turn, be too few to deliver more than a dozen successfully to the surface. There, any nests that were established would hopefully be hunted down and destroyed, with assistance from the Arachnids and Talos—and any more individuals of either of their kinds that might succeed in reaching Earth's surface in the near future.

  The terrestrial fleet was outnumbered, but not outgunned. Digges had told Francis, the last time they had met, that it was impossible to know what the balance of devastation might be after that first deadly encounter, nor what might be done thereafter by way of regrouping and giving chase. “These are not naval vessels that can turn about in a matter of minutes, given a mile or so of sea-room,” the engineer had observed. “The space and time necessary to mount a pursuit might be too great to allow any successful chase to be mounted, in practice. If the first meeting of the fleets goes badly for us, we might not get a second chance to assault the invaders effectively—not, at least, until they reach the surface. The atmosphere is our ally, of course—but we would be fools to expect or hope that mere friction might succeed if our guns cannot. We not only have to win that first exchange of fire, but win it very decisively indeed.”

  Digges was absolutely right, Francis knew. If the Selenites succeeded in establishing even a handful of nests on the Earth's surface, and defending them against attempts to wipe them out while they were still in their infancy, a war might be set in train that would last hundreds or thousands of years. On the other hand, friction might now be a better friend than Thomas Digges dared hope.

  “You ought to accept my help,” Lumen told him, as their flight finally brought them within “sight” of the Selenite Armada. “You have no skill or artistry in this work. What you did on the moon was a mere finger-exercise, crude and brutal. This requires delicacy, else you might easily cause far more destruction than you intend, not merely to Drake's fleet but to the Earth itself.”

  “I know,” said Francis. “That's why the Shadow united us again—but I won't surrender my new instruments of action to your volition. I'll make whatever use of your skills I can, but your game is over—and if any other Ethereal attempts to take a hand in this, I shall unleash such fury...”

  “None will interfere!” Lumen protested. “Aristocles is halfway across the galaxy, and cannot return until Patience Muffet does. In any case, no one—not even the Selenites—wants to see the Earth destroyed or devastated, and no Ethereal, nascent or ancient, would risk getting in your way.”

  “I'm not so certain of the Selenites,” Francis told him. “They will sustain heavy losses no matter how this encounter goes. They have no compunction in sacrificing their own soldiers; I cannot imagine that they will be careful of human lives if things go badly.”

  “You mistake them,” Lumen told him. “To devastate the surface of a world where rebellious machines have run riot or an Arachnid invasion has taken place is one thing, and insects do indeed routinely send their soldiers and workers to destruction without an atom of compunction, conscious that the true individual is the hive rather than the component—but no intelligent creature would dare to place a populated world in peril, for fear of the Creator's wrath.”

  “I hope that is so,” said Francis, although he knew full well that he was no more an agent of wrath than he was an instrument of the Creator. All that had happened to him was that a Shadow—a mere creature, with its own nature, its own interests, and its own whims—had lent him the means to defend his and humankind's ambitions, in consequence of its own game-playing impulse, or its own sense of justice. He knew well enough that the Earth was merely a tiny footnote in a complex story whose real plot was concerned with the materialization of millions of Shadows in the chaotic flux of matter surrounding the Pit at the heart of the galaxy, and that any gross transubstantiation of the galaxy's material structure that might happen in the near future would result from the deployment of powers many orders of magnitude greater than those momentarily at his disposal. Even so, he had a chance to serve as a provocative agent, and to ensure that the Earth's catalytic role in the affairs of the True Civilization would not be rudely cut short.

  He had almost caught up with the Selenite Armada when Drake's fleet engaged it, and Earth's ether-ships opened fire.

  Although the “body” in which Francis was traveling through the ether was markedly different from the familiar appearance he had temporarily assumed on the orbital platform and the moon, it still had to receive sensory information in an analogous fashion. His “eyes” were extraordinarily powerful, but they still made up a mental image by means of rays of light impinging upon his physical presence. Human eyes would have seen almost nothing at all of the battle in space, no matter where they were positioned; although Francis was able to do a great deal better than that, his impression was still rather slight and fleeting. He saw immediately, though, and understood, that this was—as Digges had observed—quite unlike a naval battle fought on an Earthly sea, and very different indeed from any clash of soldiers and artillery on a terrestrial battlefield.

  There was no evidence, in visible or audible terms, of weapons being fired; all that could be seen was the result of those shots that struck home. Francis knew, when the first ships on either side disintegrated, that for every shot that did strike home, hundreds might be going astray—but both fleets had been equipped with similar aiming devices, presumably by virtue of the fact that Aristocles had stolen the designs he had fed to Edward Kelley and John Dee from the Selenites. By the time he had counted eight vessels destroyed—four on each side—Francis knew how evenly balanced the two forces were. He also knew by then that the Selenite Armada outnumbered Drake's fleet by five hundred and forty vessels to two hundred—a larger proportionate advantage than he had hoped.

  “I can't wait,” he said to Lumen.

  Lumen, already privy to his reasoning, made no protest—not even to ask him to consider what the effect might be of his materializing on Drake's bridge.

  * * * *

  12

  Five long seconds went by between the confirmation of the decision and its being put into effect, because Francis was still unable to reach the defending fleet during that interval—and when he was able to effect it, he did indeed cause great consternation among Drake's crew.

  In fact, the ether-ship had no bridge in any conventional sense; its interior was filled with equipment, with only tiny pockets of space into which its crew was wedged. There was hardly any space into which Francis could fit a simulacrum of his own body, but he dared not adopt any other appearance. He materialized in front of Drake, who had Thomas Digges wedged in beside him, operating the apparatus that communicated with all the other ships.

  “What is this?” Drake exclaimed, when what he took to be a ghost, or an illusion, appeared before his eyes.

  “You must trust me, Captain,” Francis said. “However impossible it seems, I really am Francis Bacon, operating with aid from an ethereal and forces even more powerful. I doubt that you or Dee had time to receive my letters, but I have traveled to the center of the Milky Way and back within the last twenty-four hours, and have been gifted with a means to help us. Tell your own gunner to stand down, I beg you. Tom—bid all the other gunners listen for my voice instead of yours, speaking directly into their heads. Instruct them to relax their limbs, and not to fight me.”


  Drake, Francis saw, would not have done it. He had insufficient belief in miracles—but Thomas Digges was hesitating in puzzlement. It was Digges’ hand that Francis grasped and squeezed. “You see, Tom,” he said, in a voice that was not his own. “I promised that we would meet again, and that you would know the truth. I owe you a debt, and am ready to repay it. Go, Francis! You cannot linger here, while the Armada is already dispersing. You must entrust this part, at least, to me!”

  It was Francis’ turn to hesitate—but not for long. There was no time. “Separate, then!” he said.

  Francis’ body was, for the time being, a mere simulacrum, but that did not prevent Lumen from emerging from his nostrils like a plume of smoke, which rapidly formed itself into the image of a vaporous moth—and flew, just as rapidly, into Thomas Digges’ nostrils.

  Drake had seen that before, and had at least some reason to think that he and the other members of John Dee's first crew might not have survived their adventure had the ethereal not chosen to involve itself. In any case, Digges was already giving orders, in a voice other than his own.

  “Can you maintain communication with the other gunners without my presence?” Francis asked—aloud, because he was uncertain that Lumen could still hear his silent voice.

  “Yes,” said Lumen, speaking through Thomas Digges. “Go—and pray to God that you do not need me after all, for you might still have the better part of two hundred vessels to deal with, no matter how effective my aim may be.”

  Francis took flight once more—and saw, once his viewpoint was distributed through the ether again, that he had very little time indeed if he were to catch the Selenite vessels as he intended.

  Lumen, fortunately, did seem to be a better aiming-device than the mechanical one his cousin and competitor had provided by way of the black stone. Although Dee's ships continued to sustain losses as the two fleets converged, drawing gradually apart as they did so, while Drake's gunners strove to locate the slowly dispersing Selenite vessels, the Selenite Armada was now taking much heavier losses. The margin of difference was becoming more conspicuous with every second that passed.