Eternity's Mind (65 page)

Elisa showed her disappointment to the doctors, realizing that she'd always known they couldn't do anything. From the moment she had seen Iswander's unconscious form inside the blasted pod, she understood his prospects.

“The green priest recovered, though,” she said. “Even after Aelin was damaged, he flew out and immersed himself inside a bloater. That changed him, brought him back.” She whipped her gaze to Orli Covitz. “And you too! You came here dying. You should be dead from that Onthos plague, but you went inside a bloater, and you came out healed.”

“That was a desperate circumstance,” Orli pointed out. “And the bloaters are different now, more aware—”

“What other chance do we have?” Elisa demanded. She turned to the doctors. “I'm getting an exosuit. I'll fly him out to the nearest bloater.”

“That's not wise,” said the doctor.

“You said yourself, there's little other hope.” She turned to glare at Pannebaker, Garrison, Orli. She didn't care what they all thought, and she certainly wasn't interested in Arita or their pompous warnings. “Do I need to threaten you?” She waited for someone to argue, but Iswander was completely catatonic, and they could all see he had very little chance. “I'm taking him.”

Pannebaker gave a brief nod. “In the meantime, since I'm in charge of operations, I'm calling a full halt in compliance with the moratorium imposed by the King and Queen. The bloaters are clearly hazardous, and we will reassess the dangers. There will be no more ekti extraction for the time being.”

“Thank you,” Arita said, in a low whisper.

Elisa couldn't be concerned with that. She took the motionless Iswander and carried him back to her ship with very little assistance from the others. She didn't bother to look back at them as she propped him in the second seat in the piloting deck, activated her engines, and flew out into the bloater cluster.

The drifting nodules sparkled with erratic pulses of light, as if the space brain were filled with furious thoughts. One such outburst had damaged Iswander's mind, and she hoped that the so-called blood of the cosmos would also save him.

In the complex around them, she looked at the industrial operations that had now gone dark, just waiting. The exosuited workers, the ekti extractors, the cargo ships did nothing, paralyzed without a bold and decisive leader like Iswander. Elisa wished they all had the same dedication she did. How did they expect to get ahead in their lives and in their careers? How did they intend to make progress without putting in the effort, without taking the risks? Iswander had taught her that all along, and she understood full well that one had to be willing to fail spectacularly in order to hope for success.

Of course, Elisa would take the risk.

She flew directly to the closest bloater, hoping that another discharge would not strike her vessel and leave her as brain-damaged as Iswander. She couldn't count on anyone else to do what was necessary, and Elisa knew exactly what actions were required.

She brought her ship close to the nodule, whose mottled outer membrane bore indecipherable patterns. She saw flickers of pulsing energy deep inside the swirling murk. That fluid inside the bloater was more than just stardrive fuel; it was protoplasm in a giant brain cell. It was
hope,
maybe even a miracle.

She stabilized her ship and then spent a tedious half hour putting an exosuit on Lee Iswander. His arms were loose, his legs floppy, his eyes still closed. She sealed the helmet, then donned her own suit. Together, they would go inside the bloater, immerse themselves. It was the only chance they had.

Tethered to him and holding his limp arm, she opened the airlock hatch, and the two drifted into space. She held Iswander, spoke to him over the comm, but of course he didn't respond. Not yet. But she held on to hope. The bloater would save him, she was sure of it.

They drifted up against the giant, soft membrane. Elisa had to have faith and determination.

Cutting through the membrane was easy, and they climbed inside as protoplasm spilled out into space around them. Aelin had done this. Orli Covitz had done it. Surely Elisa could do better.

The two suited figures were drawn into the cell of the awakening space brain, sinking into the blood of the cosmos. Elisa immersed herself completely as the nodule crackled and pulsed with burgeoning energy. She pulled Lee Iswander deeper inside with her, and the membrane quickly sealed itself.

*   *   *

They never re-emerged.

Hours later, Elisa's silent and empty ship drifted away while the bloaters continued sparkling and flashing. The thoughts of Eternity's Mind continued to impose order on the universe and strengthen the laws of physics against the Shana Rei.

But Lee Iswander and Elisa Enturi were no longer part of the equation.

 

CHAPTER

126

EXXOS

The Shana Rei were blasted and battered by the titanic counterattacks that struck them from the Fireheart nebula and from within the void itself. Even as Exxos rallied, countless black robots had been annihilated; worse, he saw the creatures of darkness crippled and broken, unable to fight back and unable to flee.

The shadows had wanted to unmake the cosmos, to eliminate all life that caused them pain. But the human and Ildiran forces had attacked and wounded them in their dark dimension, unleashing so many sun bombs that they caused considerable harm.

At the same time, across the Spiral Arm the awakening Eternity's Mind strengthened the fabric of the universe, building invisible cages of structure and life that could withstand the flailing chaos of the Shana Rei. Their shadow clouds were collapsing into newborn stars, driven by the clusters of gigantic ganglia.

As the shadows reeled from that, the chain of supernovas erupting inside the nebula was orders of magnitude more devastating to them—and now the faeros had found a channel directly into the deepest black corners of the void, flooding in to destroy countless more Shana Rei, incinerating them from within.

Exxos and all his counterparts would be annihilated along with the creatures of darkness—and he could not allow that to happen.

The last remaining Klikiss robots had been painted into a corner by the Shana Rei, and they were treated as captives as much as allies. The shadows had destroyed many of the original robots by capricious whim, but they had also created millions of duplicates with their manifested dark matter.

Although Exxos had once considered the Shana Rei to be an undefeatable enemy, his robots had combined millions of processors to prepare an illicit weapon that would beat the monstrous shadows. Even so, he had not intended to use it—not yet. He had hoped that if they cooperated and helped to eliminate the humans and Ildirans, just as they had eliminated the progenitor Klikiss race long ago, then the shadows would grant them their promised reward. But Exxos had never truly believed their promises.

On the other hand, he had never believed the Shana Rei could be defeated by outside forces either. And now they were obviously wounded and reeling.

It was time. One last chance.

The harm the shadows had already suffered was immeasurable. More than half of the Shana Rei were gone, unable to comprehend their own near-mortal wounds. Right now, the creatures of darkness were the weakest they had been since reemerging into the universe. Now, the last of them retreated into the sanctuary of their protected void. They were unfocused, confused—and vulnerable.

Exxos and all the identical black robots came to the same conclusion instantaneously. Over millennia, the robots had always been willing to turn at a moment's notice, to find a vulnerability and strike. Now was their perfect chance.

Exxos gambled. He surmised that the Shana Rei might recover and grow strong again. If the robots fought alongside the creatures of darkness, helped them to escape, rebuild, and come back, then they might eventually strike the Spiral Arm again. It was a possibility … and, oh, how Exxos wanted that!

But if the Shana Rei did become powerful once more, then the robots would be mere playthings and slaves all over again. Exxos would never trust the shadows, and the robots would never escape.

Yes, this was their best opportunity.

For months, the combined processing power of millions of robot minds had developed their unorthodox entropy nullifiers, the reality-crystallization effect that required the highest-order calculations of exotic physics. Unable to guarantee that it would work, the robots would have only one chance, only one test.

Now that the Shana Rei were battered, this was an opportunity he could not ignore. The robots simultaneously put the plan into effect. They would annihilate the Shana Rei, and then they would all escape.

The pulsing inkblots with angry glowing eyes were all around them, but the shadows were desperate and paid little attention to the numerous Exxos copies that remained. He knew the Shana Rei would sacrifice every one of the robots if such a massacre would give the shadows one more moment of continued existence.

Exxos meant to take that away from them.

As the creatures of darkness retreated into their empty void, the swarms of robot copies manipulated physics, activated their calculated algorithms, and triggered the net that changed reality around the Shana Rei. The process nullified the entropy that formed their very being.

The swelling, shapeless black smears shuddered, squirmed. Their representational eyes blazed, then went dim as the inkblots fossilized. Their framework of existence crystalized into sharp order—and they shattered.

In the emptiness between dimensions, all of the Shana Rei ceased to exist—in exactly the way they had wanted to uncreate the real universe.

Exxos watched what was happening, unable to believe his perfect and complete success as the creatures of darkness simply evaporated, as if they had never existed at all. He experienced a moment of total victory.

But when the Shana Rei faded, all of the new dark matter that they had manifested out of the chaos was also erased. The atoms they had created through sheer force of will dissolved and returned into the energy of the void.

Thus, every one of the black robots they had assembled with such dark matter were similarly erased. Hundreds of thousands of Exxos copies simply vanished—every one that the Shana Rei had manifested.

After so many devastating battles, so many sacrifices in the great combat zones in space, only a single original Exxos remained.

Exxos, the last one, was left floating alone in the infinite void, an impossible speck in a universe of nothingness.…

 

CHAPTER

127

TOM ROM

The symptoms of the Onthos plague manifested in Zoe with devastating swiftness. Tom Rom was all too familiar with the disease's progress.

After everything he had done to save the two of them from the black robots and the Shana Rei, after he had sacrificed the researchers on Pergamus, using every last trick just to get away, just to rescue Zoe—now this.

“Remember when I had Conden's Fever?” Zoe said, clearly trying to keep her voice strong, which Tom Rom knew was more for his benefit than her own. “How far you flew in search of a cure, everything you did for me? You took me to Rakkem, and you got me the treatment I needed.”

“I'd do it again,” he said. “But Rakkem is empty, and any possible cure was destroyed on Pergamus.”

“That cure wouldn't have worked on the new strain anyway,” Zoe said. “I ran the test myself. The Klikiss royal jelly is no longer effective. I'm glad it saved you, though.”

She looked up from her bed in the back compartment. She was sweating, her skin gray except for where it was mottled with darkening spots. “And you? Any symptoms yet?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I feel fine. I'm capable of taking care of you.”

“You would take care of me no matter how you felt,” she said, and added a faint smile. “I'm glad you're still immune. It was my stupid mistake. All my life I knew that if I dropped my guard, some disease would get me. It's almost as if the viruses were planning revenge for everything I did to wipe them out.” She tried to prop herself up on the bunk.

As the ship flew onward into the emptiness of nowhere on autopilot, Tom Rom knelt beside her. “Can I get you anything?”

“Just stay here. I think I might like to review the records of the old plague after all. I never much cared about those maudlin last messages from clan Reeves, but would you watch them with me now? I want to see how those people said farewell as they faced the same disease.”

“I don't think that's wise,” said Tom Rom. “You're different from all of them. Stronger than all of them. They were just Roamers, afraid of their own shadows. They ran into hiding because they couldn't face society. You're nothing like that.”

Zoe raised her eyebrows. “Really? We hid on Pergamus. We kept ourselves away from the rest of the Confederation.”

“You weren't hiding. You were isolating yourself. You were protecting your specimens and your research. There's a difference.”

“You're just rationalizing,” she said. “I was keeping my work away from everyone else in the Confederation. I didn't think they deserved any of it after what they had done to me.”

Tom Rom nodded. “It was your decision to make. It was your research, your discoveries.”

He thought of how the two of them had tended Adam Alakis during his slow death from Heidegger's Syndrome, how they had gone to the biomerchants on Rakkem, seen the hideous profitability of cures and vaccines, as well as crackpot treatments.

Even with her huge research facility, Zoe had never preyed on other people, had never taken advantage of the sick and dying. She just wanted to build her own collection. Was that so terrible? A wealthy man who collected antiques wasn't obligated to share them with anyone else who wanted them. Why should Zoe's collection of disease specimens and cures be any different? She had paid for it. She had monitored her scientists, who produced magnificent work, and Tom Rom was proud that he had contributed to the Pergamus effort. He had obtained so many of those specimens. For her.