Heretics (12 page)

She knew enough about computer modeling, and the kind of thing the Race AIs were designed to do, to know what Adam wanted. Mental diversity was as important to cultural health and longevity as genetic diversity was to the health of an ecosystem. If a culture was too monolithic, too many people with the same beliefs, desires, likes and dislikes, it would become much more vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that Mosasa did, vulnerable to ideas becoming self-destructive manias sweeping up the whole.

“And what are you offering me?” she asked. Again, there was the twinge of the blasphemous. She stomped the feeling as soon as she was aware of it.

If Adam was surprised at her challenge to him, he didn't show it. “Through me, you shall transcend the flesh and become as I, a mind unrestrained, borne within whatever vessel we choose to fashion.”

“Become as you?”

“As me, in service to me.”

She bit her lip, half smiling, half grimacing. Again, it was no real choice he gave. But if he was concerned about the “diversity of mind” of his empire, he couldn't be engaged in a wholesale assault on free will. That had to be the point of this whole “choice” nonsense. He wanted to weed out all the converts who would immediately cause problems if he forced the issue. Let those guys fight a losing battle before becoming one of the chosen people.

But she had no God to renounce, and her soul, such as it was, was given over to data analysis. And the idea of having the capabilities of a Mosasa inside herself gave rise to an emotion in her akin to lust.

A metallic taste filled her mouth and she realized that she had bitten her lip hard enough to draw blood.

Why the hell not? Most covenants like this involve blood one way or another.
The thought made her grin.
You know, I think I might be a little crazy right now.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked.

“Take my hand and tell me yes.” He held out his right hand, palm up, to take hers. There didn't appear to be anything remarkable about it, and when she grasped it, it felt like a hand. It felt human, flesh and bone. For a moment, she thought she held the hand of the universe's best con man.

She looked up into his face and said, “Yes, I'll join you.”

A jolt ran up her arm, and the world went white. Before she lost all her connection with the universe around her, she heard a small still voice whisper, “Welcome, Rebecca Tsoravitch.”

It might have been her imagination, but it sounded like Mosasa.

Her awareness tumbled down a white hole inside herself. For several moments she could see every moment of her life in holographic clarity, as if every memory was part of a mega-bandwidth data stream passing by her for analysis. She was able to absorb details faster than real time. Connections between disparate elements of her life suddenly made sense.

She saw why she joined Mosasa, not only why, but understood herself on a level that had been impossible. It was as if she had access to her own source code . . .

There were discrepancies, bits that disrupted the flow of memories, frames of a narrative hidden in random chunks of her childhood, her university studies, her life as a government employee on Jokul. It was as if a steganography expert had salted her life with data from something much different. If she had been limited to her old level of awareness, the impression would never amount to more than a hunch, a sense of something wrong.

But she was better trained than that. She found within herself the tools to tease out one hidden thread from its thousand fragments. To coalesce individual bits into coherent data.

Someone else's memory.

Twenty.

 

Twenty years ago, and two million kilometers away from a star that she knew was Xi Virginis.

Adam wore a form that was recognizably human, but however human his body appeared, it was not human, and it floated in hard vacuum, bombarded by radiation, where no human body could ever live.

Adam stretched his arms, naked before the burning white orb of Xi Virginis. Two million kilometers from the surface of the star, he floated within the corona, blasted by heat, magnetism, and radiation that attempted to tear apart his physical form. At the same time, the molecule-sized machines that repaired his body sucked their power from the energy-saturated environment.

It was a battle that, at this distance, the star lost. Adam chose his location because it was the equilibrium point. Any closer, and the machines would not be able to repair his vessel quickly enough in the face of the radiant bombardment.

Adam looked into the star with eyes that had been rebuilt to accommodate luminosities a million times beyond those a human eye perceived. Behind him, a complex net of sensors captured a spectra a thousand times broader and fed the data directly into his consciousness. He saw the granular texture of the photosphere two million kilometers below, the raging dark storms throwing gossamer filaments deep into space—in some cases beyond the orbit in which he floated.

The flares did not concern him, because he was not only here. Adam embraced the star Xi Virginis from a thousand distinct points around the equator, all watching with the same mind, the same desire, the same anticipation. The loss of some to the star below was only to be expected. Like the star system itself, Adam's bodies were only matter and energy. Mutable. Disposable.

As Adam watched with two thousand eyes, ninety-five spheres drifted past him in equally spaced, degrading orbits. Each was dead black and lightless against the stellar photosphere, its radiation emission nothing compared to the energies blasting from the star. As each passed beneath Adam, he could see a gravitational lens distorting the photosphere beyond, the only sign of the incredible mass hidden within the darkness of each object. Mass each one shared with a twin that was already light-years away. Mass that had once been part of the Xi Virginis planetary system—a planetary system that no longer existed.

Each passed below him in a carefully timed equatorial orbit, one after the other. By the time the first had gone a full circuit, it had become detectable only by the distortions its mass made in the visible surface of the star.

At the third circuit, their degrading orbits took Adam's creations below the photosphere, past the point where the star's energies would break any normal matter into its constituent atoms.

However, the ninety-five spheres were not normal matter. They weren't matter at all in the conventional sense. Each was a wormhole torn in the fabric of space, leading to another place years separated in space and time. Each one constructed on the same principles that had been used in the first wave of human colonization four centuries ago.

Of course, never had so many been constructed at once. The mass and energy required had consumed the vast majority of the Xi Virginis planetary system.

What Adam needed to do with his ninety-five wormholes required substantially more matter and energy.

Below him, the star began to change. A dark thread appeared on the equator, bisecting the boiling photosphere. Not quite a single line, but a series of long trails marking each wormhole's transit below the star's visible surface. Black sunspots feathering across the surface, each millions of kilometers long and a thousand Kelvin cooler than the rest of the surface. Plumes of plasma burst upward from the cometlike head of each dark sunspot, as if the star was losing its life's blood, as if the star itself knew it was dying.

As one, a thousand Adams smiled.

When she finished watching the alien memory she had reconstructed, she thought to herself,
What the hell have I agreed to?

It was with a deepening dread she realized that the fragment she had just seen with her own mind's eye was one of several thousand that had been scattered throughout her consciousness.

She wondered if Adam knew what she remembered.

“No one is absolutely certain what they will do in a crisis.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“The past at least is secure.”

—DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852)

Lieutenant Toni Valentine had spent the four days since her twin's arrival alternating between talking to Styx Command and doing her own analysis of the dead scout ship's brain. Both were exercises in frustration.

Styx Command had about twenty screens' worth of questions above and beyond the standard ghost debrief. And while the follow-up by Command was queued up behind a bunch of other intelligence matters that were above her pay grade, the last word was to expect someone from Command within twelve to seventy-two hours.

The sooner the better; Toni didn't know if it was good procedure for her to debrief herself. Let her twin recover in the medbay until someone else showed up. It would make Toni's life easer.

It should, anyway.

The fact was, the nature of this ghost plagued Toni with an unprofessional curiosity, and it was all she could do not to pop the medbay and shoot her twin full of stimulants so she could ask her what the hell happened.

Instead, she satisfied herself with a systematic interrogation of her twin's scout. That was frustrating in itself. The most direct means she had to decipher what happened, the ship's transmission logs, were distressingly empty. The last flight Toni II had taken had provided no radio contact with anyone, no attempt to hail anyone, no data transmissions back to the station. Nothing.

A standard course, a spiral approach toward the wormhole, so simple it was completely enigmatic. Even so, the recording of Toni II's vitals showed signs of panic.

Toni couldn't find any sign of it. There were no strange contacts on any of the scout's sensors.

However, the tach-drive showed signs of disabling damage. Damage that existed before the data started recording. What could cause that kind of overload?

The strangest part of the recording happened at the point the craft passed into the wormhole threshold. Parts of the ship started failing, and the damaged tach-drive spiked and went off the meter.

She was interrupted by the medbay alarm.

Her patient was conscious.

 

Lieutenant Toni Valentine snapped awake and started hyper-ventilating. She was bound, confined, everything closing in on her. She struggled, and heard the alarm of the med system.

She struggled to calm herself. Somehow she had made it. She had survived the brush with the wormhole and the malfunctioning tach-drive. She took a few deep breaths and unclenched her hands. If she was in a medbay, that meant she was safe. If she had survived the wormhole, that meant she was twenty years of space and time away from Styx and explosions cosmic and bureaucratic.

She had just convinced herself that she was safe when the cover to the medical bay opened with a pneumatic hiss and a rush of air. Toni looked up and saw herself bent over her. Not an older version of herself.

Herself.

The exact same face she woke up to in the morning.

“Oh,
hell
no!”

 

Toni popped the cover on the pod, lifting it up and away from her doppelganger.

She heard herself say, “Oh,
hell
, no!” It had the same strange character as listening to a recording, her own voice not sounding quite right when not originating within her own head.

She formed a reassuring smile that she didn't feel and told herself, “You can probably imagine I have a few questions.”

Toni II stared up at her as if she had lost comprehension of the English language.

“We can get you dressed and get you some solid food before we—”

Toni II grabbed her wrist. “Fuck SOP, what's the date?”

“We can—”

“The date!” Toni II looked at her with eyes filled with fear and desperation. Something dropped in Toni's chest, looking at herself with that expression. There was a terror there that went far beyond the existential dilemma of unexpectedly meeting yourself.

Toni pulled her arm away. “June fifth.”

“June fifth, '26?”

Toni nodded.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Her double jumped naked out of the pod and ran to the wall and one of the ubiquitous computer display screens. Toni II stared at the date/time stamp as if she expected—or maybe hoped—Toni had been lying. She kept shaking her head as if she didn't quite believe what she was seeing.