Heretics (44 page)

“Always bet on the team following fewer rules.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Any exercise of power is justified in preserving power.”

—DIMITRI OLMANOV (2190-2350)

The
Prophet's Voice
emerged into the observable universe in a burst of tachyon radiation. The vast cloud of matter, the extension of Adam's will that had preceded him into humanity's home system, welcomed its arrival and transmitted telemetry data from the inner system it had been gathering since the destruction of the wormholes that had brought it here.

Adam stood on the bridge of the
Voice,
but he also existed everywhere within the ship, and outside in the vast cloud of matter in orbit around the sun. All were vast pieces of himself, coordinating, communicating.

Though that network flowed the will of his followers, who numbered now millions more than the few embodied souls within the
Voice.
Whatever their origin, the original colony orbiting the sacrificial star Xi Virginis, Salmagundi, Khamsin—they belonged to Adam now. And before them all sat the heart of humanity, mother Terra itself.

Adam ignored the errant thought. All life was sacred, too sacred to allow its descent into entropy and decay. Mankind would not face the fate of Adam's creators. When he was done, all of humanity, all life, would be immortal and inviolate.

And his.

Mind flowed out of the
Voice
into the living cloud, each consciousness taking part of the sentient matter for itself, each becoming an agent of Adam's redemption, to carry his light to every inhabitant of this solar system.

It took nearly two full seconds for a sequence of errant data to make it from the coalescing intelligent cloud to reach his awareness.

The fleet attached to the
Voice
separated, spreading out to engage what spacecraft remained in the system here. Nothing with an active engine or electrical system could hide from the
Voice
's sensors or the broad awareness of the cloud. Within fifteen minutes, ships would be in tactical range of each other and those opponents that drifted in toward the cloud would be dealt with less conventionally.

While his disciples from Khamsin piloted their warcraft toward the opposition, and others more comfortable in their transcendence from the flesh took their places in the cloud, Adam reviewed what the cloud had seen on Mars.

A smile crossed the face of Adam's manifestation on the bridge of the
Voice.
Mosasa, his brother, had not been the Evil One, at least not solely. The existence of light formed darkness, and Adam's light was bright indeed. He broadcast his announcement to Earth, and waited for his latest Devil to make itself known.

“In twelve hours you must choose what God you serve.”

Adam's message repeated, in every language, and on every broadcast frequency used on Earth. Cardinal Anderson stood in the papal apartments realizing that they had reached the limits of what they could do, what the Church could do. They couldn't even communicate with anyone outside the Vatican. Adam's message wasn't just an ultimatum, but it effectively blocked almost all other communications.

The few communications channels that weren't blocked were disabled by the secondary effects of Adam's announcement. He had no news from the wider world, but he had seen the teeming throng in St. Peter's Square, and he had seen columns of smoke rising from Rome's skyline.

“God help us all,” he said as he turned from the armored window.

The pope stood by the doorway and said, “Pray that we have acted as God wished.”

“I am concerned for your safety,” Cardinal Anderson said. “It is close to a riot out there.”

“If I am in danger, it is not from the people in the square, and I won't be saved merely by hiding in my apartments. If all I can do is give comfort to those in reach of my voice, I will do so.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“Perhaps you should see to Mr. Dacham.”

Cardinal Anderson nodded as the pope left to give what might be his last Mass.

Rebecca Tsoravitch retained a physical presence on the
Voice
even as her spirit trailed behind Adam to see the full extent of his invasion. Along with her followed the silent ghost of Tjaele Mosasa. Even though her perception was limited by the speed of light, it was vast and she saw more clearly than she had even during the approach to Khamsin.

She knew she was exceptional, even among Adam's host. Few had graduated from fleshy biology to a distributed existence as quickly and as thoroughly as her. The only precedent she had to compare herself to was the original Mosasa, himself, integrating his mind, like a virus, into all of Adam's chosen.

Perhaps that was why Mosasa's AI embodiment chose her in the first place. Perhaps her human self bore some kinship with his. Or perhaps her spirit had absorbed more of Mosasa than others.

Whatever the case, all of Adam's minions whose origins were rooted to the flesh limited themselves in space and time. All felt a need to enforce a boundary between themselves and the rest of the universe, however porous that boundary became. She found herself able to slide her awareness to the limits of Adam's reach. The whole network of thinking machines that formed the cloud drifting insystem ahead of the
Voice
was open to her eyes and her thoughts. And, if she chose not to be subtle, her actions.

Fortunately, while Adam could see with the entire array of the cloud, he cared little about what his chosen cared to look upon, as long as they followed his direction without question.

She was one of a few entities aware enough to have seen the consequences of questioning Adam. He was not a merciful God. Those who chose his path saw many sins forgiven—but one. Questioning or disobedience was met with instantaneous nonexistence. All of Adam's followers dwelled in a network of matter and information that was, in large part, Adam himself. Should he will it, any of his millions would cease to exist. Already thousands had, some for balking at purging the unbelievers from Khamsin, some for questioning Adam's divine purpose, some for simply asking “Why?” at the wrong time.

It seemed to her that as Adam's sphere grew and his followers multiplied, he grew harsher, more inflexible. Even his words changed with each new world.

To the people of Salmagundi he had said,
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

To Khamsin, he had said,
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Worship me and you will become as gods yourselves.”

To Earth, he was saying,
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Worship me or become as dust.”

Even those who had come to Adam's fold completely willingly, like those liberated from the Hall of Minds to meld seamlessly into Adam's distributed mind, had begun to move and act tentatively, the silent miasma of fear almost as real as the cloud itself.

To her it wasn't unfamiliar. She had grown up under the Jokul Autocracy. She lived well under a government just as draconian about questioning and disobedience as Adam. She policed the data streams under a regime where every citizen knew that every word and act was scrutinized for subversion, and their lives were lived subject to the whims of any anonymous bureaucrat that might take offense to them.

So the caution she saw evolving under Adam's rule was very familiar. As was Adam himself. She also knew how to survive under such authority: Never assume that you weren't being watched. Never voice your dissent. Consume all the information available. And keep constant watch for a potential escape route.

Whatever Adam wreaked upon the rest of the world, her priority was survival. Even as he slaughtered billions, she would unapologetically be on the side of the survivors. Even when it meant being his avatar, walking the surface of the Earth harvesting souls for a god she didn't remotely believe in.

She did not expect a challenge to Adam's omnipotence to come as soon as it did.

The first sign was buried in data the cloud had collected before their arrival. She hadn't accessed it, being more intent on seeing what was happening in real time around the
Voice
as the conventional armada spread out to engage the few military vessels moving against them in a complicated dance of acceleration vectors that slowly took them in tactical range of each other's weapons.

But as the first missiles were fired, she noticed stars being occluded and felt the gravitational ripples of very dense mass approaching from insystem. Sensing that through the sensors of the cloud, she rolled back those perceptions through time, backtracking the trails of unusual mass to the fourth planet in the system. Focusing on Mars with the past eye of the cloud, she saw the surface of the planet dotted by tall black spires reaching from the surface all the way into low orbit and beyond.

The spires had launched something into space.

Many somethings.

Her attention snapped back to real time as a million-kilometer radius sphere of the cloud ceased to exist. She felt it as if a clawed hand tore out a chunk of her brain, and a limb to go along with it. Her thoughts had spread out along the whole cloud in an effort to make herself less vulnerable. But something was attacking the cloud itself.

She pulled back as more vast holes were plucked out of the cloud, each hitting her like a physical blow. Even as she withdrew, and holes tore through her awareness of the universe outside the
Voice
, she saw what was happening.

Thousands of dense ovoid objects, only meters across, were flying through space toward them. The first wave was reaching the cloud, and as they did, they released a flash of energy that tore apart the material of the cloud on a molecular level. Each flash erased thousands of Adam's followers less diffuse than she was, and rendered inert large swaths of the cloud.

Then she coalesced herself back into her physical presence on the
Voice
. Once again, she found herself surprised by her own breathing and the race of her pulse, though this time she was aware of it and stopped her physical body's reactions from running away from her.

She glanced around the prosaic cabin in the
Voice
with her own body's eyes and wondered what she was going to do if Adam was really threatened.

“Even if you expect change, the change is not what you expect.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Naught endures but change.”

—LUDWIG BOERNE (1786-1837)

“I speak now to all peoples, all faiths, all creeds.”
The words echoed through the cockpit of the
Daedalus
, Mallory stood between Captain Valentine and the elder Stavros while Valentine's sister operated the communications console. Floating in the display before her was the image of His Holiness Pope Stephen XII.
“I bear a dire warning for all of mankind.”

Mallory looked into the pope's eyes, feeling a surreal displacement from where he was. So much had happened since he had taught university at Occisis, it felt like another universe.

The video switched and Mallory heard audible gasps from the others in the cockpit as the holo transmission filled with his own face.
“I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory.”
Mallory looked at himself, haggard and gaunt in the image. It deepened the sense of displacement he felt.
“I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship
Eclipse,
which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis.”
It slowly sank in that his tach-comm had made it. Despite Adam's efforts, a transmission had slipped through. The evil could be beaten. It
was
possible.

The pope himself must have come to the same conclusion, if the Vatican was retransmitting it. On the screen Mallory said,
“The Caliphate has forces here, but the attack is coming from a third party, an entity identifying itself as Adam.”

The transmission cut back to the pope who said,
“The Caliphate sent the most advanced military fleets to these colony worlds. Carriers with hundreds of ships and tachyon drives that can move as fast as this data transmission. But they did not succeed in annexing these colonies, because they did not face a conventional adversary. They faced
the
Adversary.”

The image cut again, to somewhere not immediately familiar. A man in a Caliphate military uniform with a colonel's lapel pips spoke Arabic into a shaky camera. The pontiff's voice narrated.
“This transmission arrived on Earth less than twelve hours ago. It originated from Khamsin, the capital of the Eridani Caliphate, a planet with over five billion people, only ten and a half light-years from Earth. What you are seeing happened four days ago.”