DUALITY: The World of Lies (27 page)

He tapped the anchor into the stone with care
and patience. This was his third vertical ascent on this particular
ledge today, and he had taken the time to remove the anchors on
each descent. There would be, after all, no permanent stakes in
place for him when the defining task came, so setting them was as
vital a skill to perfect as the motion and rope-work.

A familiar voice hollered up to him. “Son of
Danu! Get back to your fields! You don’t have the build for rock
climbing!”

Indulu. Gahre swung about in his harness and
spotted him. “Yet here I am, mastering it!”

“Where did you get that equipment? The village
is forbidden to you… and you have no coin!” Indulu shouted
back.

“I snuck in through the dark of night, roused
trader Yohad from his sleep and bid him sell me his finest climbing
gear. My lack of coin did cause him hesitation, but when I showed
him a voucher of payment bearing the seal of none other than the
very Counselor Indulu himself, I found myself served at
once!”

“Then I've a right to know of that
which I fund, young one!” Indulu hollered in return. “You are
considering an expedition into these mountains perhaps?”

Gahre laughed as he swiftly and artfully
repelled twenty meters and descended before Indulu with a dramatic,
cat-like landing. “Nay, Honored One, I intend to climb a
wall.”

“One much higher than that ledge,” Indulu
sighed. “When will you depart?”

“When the redmoon Oberion next wanes.” Gahre
reached into his sack, pulled out a leather case,
and unfolded its contents. “Trader Yohad also procured
for me this intricate trail atlas of the known world, Honored One.
Through the forest to the southeast, I reach the Cathalanian
township in two weeks by foot. From there…”

“Nay, young one.” Indulu shook his head and
drew his finger northward along the map. “You will be found out for
certain. I tell you, travel a northern route
through the hinterlands and from there cross the badlands
into your homeborn lands of the Zenith realms. The Order
has little presence there. Go eastward through Zenithia
until reaching water. Then secure passage on a fishing vessel to
reach the far shore of the Mercantile Sea.”

“Is that wise, Honored One? Zenithia may be my
birthrealm, but I remember very little of it. By all accounts, they
are exclusionary peoples, wary of strangers.”

“Highly xenophobic, yes, but they are
civilized folk. So long as you cross the palms of a few local
officials and take care not to involve yourself in their affairs,
your passing will be smooth.”

Gahre wondered what exactly he would be
crossing anyone’s palms with. “I will trust, Honored One, that
yours is the wiser of the two routes.”

Indulu barely seemed to hear him. “From there,
you will be in your arboreal element, trail to trail all 2300
kilometers to Pyre, foraging as you go. Pyre, you can see, borders
the Sea of Sand. There are oases here and here. But as I’ve already
told you, it can’t be crossed.”

Gahre diligently marked the locations. “With
all due respect, Honored One, I shall prove you wrong.”

“The first oasis may be reached
by resilient men. It is at times inhabited by nomads, who
will charge you a high fee for its water, or just rob you outright
and leave you to die. The second oasis is more than thrice the
distance from the first as the first is to hydrated land. Most
explorers who have sought it have died. The few who made it to the
far oasis did so by burying stores of water drawn from the first
oasis along its route. The distance from the second oasis
to the outskirts of the Far Forest is again thrice that
from the first to the second, and has never been conquered by man.
That span is too dry and vast, even for the winged ones. If a man
were to spend a year or two hauling containers and burying what
little extra water he did not consume at further and further
eastward intervals, it might be done. But to attempt it on a single
crossing is suicide.”

“Time is on my side, Honored One. I will seek
the favor of the locals and learn the ways of the desert.” Gahre
eyeballed and traced along in marking where Indulu had shown him
the outskirt of the Far Forest on the very edge of the
map. “Where is this wall?”

“Here.” Indulu indicated a spot in the air
well to the right of where the map's edge ended, and ran
his finger north to south. Gahre flipped the page and penciled it
in on the other side.

“Where shall I scale it?”

“Anywhere and nowhere. The height is uniform
the whole length.”

“Surely there is a gate, a river,
something?”

“As impassible as the desert.” Indulu reached
into his robe and withdrew a fat pouch. He extended it to
Gahre.

“What is this, Honored One? Coin?”

“1000 in coin, 4000 in gem. Take
it.”

“Honored One, that is a small fortune. You
have financed me enough, I cannot accept this.”

“It is not from me. It is from the account of
Danu, your father. His salary has accrued for decades in my
custody. There is not a doubt in my mind he’d want you to have it
for such an ambitious undertaking.”

“Why does my father not collect his salary for
many decades?”

“Because he serves under Logos and is privy to
his secrets, he cannot communicate with us. And, surely, he cares
not in the least of money.”

“Who is this Logos?”

“An ascended master of unmatched intellect and
longevity, Logos is the Emperor of The Realms of Ignis Rubeli. He
is considered a demigod.”

“And in what manner does my father serve this
supposed deity?”

“That, my son, is not just Forbidden
Knowledge, it is a highly guarded state secret unbeknownst to most
of the High Council, who consider Logos to be the enemy of this
world, Occitania.”

“Our world has an enemy and my father serves
him?”

“No, young one! The relationship between Red
and Blue is multifaceted and deeply interwoven. Because, just on
the most graspable level of understanding, they are militarily
mightier than we. There is a longstanding issue between the stars
that Logos means to rectify, by some as yet unknown but
catastrophic instrument. Danu, therefore, acts as the Emperor’s…
spiritual advisor, advocating peace on our behalf.”

Gahre felt a growing unease inside himself. “I
can’t understand, Honored One, why a divine being would have the
inclination to harm our world in the first place. Is it not said
that the wise ruler fosters life, peace, and abundance? I can only
wonder if we have not wronged him somehow.”

Indulu closed his eyes and spoke to Gahre’s
puzzlement. “Abundance, I have darkly learned, is the predecessor
of peace. Perhaps you can’t comprehend it, young one, for there is
not even a word for famine in the Pangea.”

“So define it for me. It is… an Arathian word,
I take it?”

“Yes, and it means ‘mass
starvation’.”

Gahre gave his mind a moment to construct the
implication of this discourse and finally sighed with
understanding. “Then you have taught me a truly abhorrent term,
Honored One.”

W
hen Aru
returned with the garb and food, Mei was waiting anxiously for him
in the zero-com foyer with the inner door sealed.

“Is there a problem, Commander?”

“Let's just say our baby has done a lot of
growing up since you were last here.”

“You mean in the past fifteen
minutes?”

“Yes. Aru, I don't think we should be going in
there at all.”

“Huh... what? Well, we have to, don't we? He
needs to be clothed and nourished and the like.”

“You don't understand. Look!”

Aru peered into the viewing window. The cyborg
was standing amidst of a mass of projections, animated and complex,
with long mathematical formulas of dizzying complexity. The sight
was reminiscent of the time he visited the control chamber of the
Machine Lord Mnemtech. Just being reminded of that encounter with
Mnemtech sent a raw chill down his spine.

“How is that possible? There's no holographic
matrix set up in there.”

“They spring from his body, Aru! And that's
not all. He is insistent that we change course with the Kinetic and
destine ourselves for Beixing Prime, in the PoleStar North system.
Something about Logos and a secret plot to reverse the energy flow
in the Taiji.”

Aru shook his head and blinked.
“What??”

“You heard me. He's full-scale maniacal. He
wants to infiltrate Beixing Prime and take it over. And he thinks
Logos created him as a vessel to transfer his soul and mind
into.”

This being, whatever he was, they could sure
he was a creation of Logos. The last verified creation of Logos was
over 2 centuries ago when Mnemtech was sprung upon the Taiji and
the Emperor went silent. Aru was not sure how, but there had to be
some reason for this second creation. As implausible as what he'd
just heard sounded, taking that creation's words at face value was
nothing to discount.

“Well,” he considered, “that kind of makes
sense though, doesn't it? I mean the second part. Logos is
centuries old, and if he does still live his body must be in a
state of incurable decay. So he has created as a core
super-consciousness in a new body, without allowing its mind
or soul to develop, so that he might inhabit it, and through which
he can continue to live and rule.”

“There's no such thing as human to human soul
transfer, Captain Atheist. And that's coming from me, the loony
Blue girl who actually believes in souls.”

He could hardly believe he was
suggesting it either, but neither Logos nor Ming fit a
strict definition of what constituted a “human.” “Among humans, no,
but in the machine world...”

“Machine soul and human soul are entirely
different suppositions. Machine soul is imbued by the intent of the
human or machine creator, whereas human soul is aethereally divine
and imbued by the cosmos, not something that can be manipulated in
a lab.”

Aru would have preferred to leave the cosmos
out of this, but there was no skating around that stuff with
Mei.

“Well by that logic, he is already imbued
then, by his creator, Logos. And like his creator, he is a hybrid
of both man and machine. I would love to get him under a proper
internal scan and see what kind of hardware he's packing, but
there's no way to do that without involving System.”

“I'm telling you, he's dangerous, Aru! We
broached the concept of lying and deception and his eyes lit up
like he was having some kind of an epiphany. Sure he seemed
harmless enough right after we extracted him, but he's developing
and fast. I mean, if he can project holographs, don't you think
there is a high likelihood he is as
well bodily weaponized in some manner?”

A very high likelihood, Aru was starting to
think. Maybe she was right; maybe he needed to be contained under
even more stringent security measures than they had in place now.
But how?

“He hasn't tried to harm us yet or made an
aggressive overture. And the bottom line is that if we don't open
that door, he doesn't eat or drink, and we arrive in Arath in two
weeks with a dead man. I'm going in there to hear him out. Then
I'll try to set things straight and make the rules of his
detainment clear between us all.”

“I'll stand guard here.”

“No, I need you on the bridge.”

“I'll unseal the outer foyer door after you've
entered so Kinny can contact me in the unlikely event of a bridge
emergency. As things stand, I'm far more concerned about you being
alone in there with him.”

“That's against zero-com room
protocol.”

“Yeah, well, fuck protocol. I'm going to be
armed and ready to come in there after you the moment anything
happens.”

Wow, she truly was disturbed by this entity.
Aru didn't have that same imminent sense of danger regarding Ming,
but Mei was right. Even as a dumb human, he was still a high level
machine intelligence. And his lack of humanity combined with his
rapid ongoing evolution of mind now that he knew that, well,
reality existed, made him unpredictable at best. The cut and dry of
it here was that they had their orders and this mission was
essentially already in the bag. All that remained was to deliver
the prisoner back to Arath and into the custody of Service
Intelligence. And after all they'd been through to get to this
point, he wasn't about to let anything undermine this one last
simple step.

Aru approached Ming swiftly and sternly,
audibly stomping his heels in an authoritative stride. Ming had
paused his tactile holographic tasks to face him, this time with
his mouth closed and all the upright confidence his poise had
previously lacked.

“Please dispel these graphics,” Aru ordered
sharply.

Without diverting eye contact from Aru, Ming
casually cast away the myriad of images with a wave of his
hand.

Aru placed the garments and foodstuffs onto
the table.

“I hope this is all your size. Standard
enlisted uniform, sans electronics.”