The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Whereas the ESA is an organization of enviable morality,” Alkad snapped back. “How many people did you murder just tracking me down?”

  “You people have got to be fucking kidding,” Liol said. “You can’t even decide how to decide? Listen to yourselves! This kind of personal stupidity is what dumps humans into the shit every time. We just discuss it and make a decision. That’s it. Finish.”

  “No,” Samuel said. “The captain decides.”

  “Me?” Joshua asked.

  Monica stared at the Edenist in astonishment. “Him!”

  “Yes, I agree,” the serjeant said. “Joshua decides.”

  “He never doubted,” Samuel said. “Did you, Joshua? You’ve always known this would end in success.”

  “I hoped it would, sure.”

  “You doubted this flight,” Samuel told Monica. “You didn’t fully believe it would end in success. If you had, you would have been prepared to make the decision. Instead, you have doubts, that disqualifies you. Whoever does this must have conviction.”

  “Like yours, for instance,” Monica said. “A subset of your famous rationality.”

  “I too find myself unqualified for this. Although Edenists think as one, to make a decision of this magnitude I find myself wanting the reassurance of the Consensus. It would seem Edenism has a flaw after all.”

  Joshua gazed round at his crew. “You’ve all been very quiet.”

  “That’s because we trust you, Joshua,” Sarha said simply, and smiled.

  “You’re our captain.”

  Strange, Joshua thought, when you got right down to the naked truth, people actually had faith in him. Who he was, what he’d achieved, meant something to them. It was quite humbling, really. “All right,” he said slowly. He datavised the singularity: “Is that acceptable to you?”

  “I cannot take responsibility for your decisions, collective or otherwise. My only constraints are that I will not permit you to use my abilities as a weapon. Other than that, you have free access.”

  “Okay. Show me what happened.”

  The possessed in the nave had dropped to their knees, concentrating hard on producing the stream of energistic power which the dark Messiah demanded from them for his summoning. Up on the gallery facing them, Quinn’s robe evaporated into pure shadow and began to flow out from his body, filling the air around him like a black spectre. At the heart, his naked body gleamed silver. He accepted the offering from his followers, and directed it as he pleased. It spilled down across the floor below the cathedral’s dome, prying at the structure of reality, weakening it.

  Powel Manani and Fletcher Christian looked down at their feet in consternation as the tiles around them sprouted a luminous purple haze.

  The soles of their shoes became enmeshed with the surface, making it hard to lift their feet up.

  “I need to get near him,” Powel said.

  Fletcher glanced up at the swarthy occultation looming above. “I wish to be as far from this dread place as possible. But I will not leave without her.”

  Powel exerted his own energistic power to yank his feet clear of the tiles. Even then it took considerable effort to move them. He shuffled right up in front of Fletcher, the two of them almost touching. The bottom of his sweatshirt was lifted a couple of centimetres, revealing Louise’s anti-memory weapon shoved into the top of his waistband.

  “Very well,” Fletcher said. “But it will be no easy endeavour. I hear the fallen angels approaching.”

  The haze was thrumming, issuing a howl of lament and greed. Below that, the fabric of the universe was thinning in accordance with Quinn’s desire. They could both feel pressure being exerted from the other side, a desperate scrabbling.

  “Not good,” Powel said. The tiles were becoming insubstantial. He pulled his feet out again; they’d sunk several centimetres below the surface.

  “I will make a stand and distract him,” Fletcher said. “You may have time to reach the stairs.”

  “I don’t think so. This stuff is getting worse than quicksand.”

  The purple haze vanished. Fletcher and Powel looked round wildly. A drop of ectoplasm dribbled up in a crack between two tiles, making a soft blup. A patch of dense white frost solidified around it.

  “Now what?” Powel grunted with apprehension.

  More ectoplasm was bubbling up. Sluggish rivulets began to form as it ran together. The tiles left uncovered had all turned sparkling white from frost. Fletcher could feel cold air rushing off the sludgy fluid. His breath had become hoary.

  “Welcome, my brothers,” Quinn’s voice boomed across the cathedral.

  “Welcome to the battlefield. Together we will bring down the Night of our Lord.”

  The entire area of floor underneath the dome had become a pool of burping and foaming ectoplasm. Fletcher and Powel were hopping from foot to foot, frantically trying to banish the excruciating cold from their legs. They suddenly stood still, tensing as a V-shaped ripple moved across the pool.

  Waves of hot, lustful emotion were surging up from the dimensional rift in counter to the physical cold. A curving spike lifted up out of the floor, ectoplasm flowing along its length. It was over three metres high.

  Fletcher watched it rise in horrified awe. Another one was emerging at the side of it, ectoplasm gurgling loudly as it lapped against the base.

  “Lord Jesus protect your servants,” he whispered. He and Powel backed away from the twin spikes as a third one budded.

  The ectoplasm was bubbling energetically now. Smaller tendrils were writhing up, erupting all over the pool like a fur of rapacious cilia.

  One started to curl round Powel’s leg. With a cry he managed to stumble away from it. The tip blossomed into a snapping five-talon claw. He pointed a finger at it and flung a slim blast of white fire. The claw shuddered, and large ripples of ectoplasm surged towards it.

  “Stop!” Fletcher shouted hoarsely. The ectoplasm licking its way up his legs was doing far more than freezing his flesh, he realized. His mental strength was reducing, and with it his energistic power.

  The claw’s talons had almost doubled in size under the impact of the white fire. Powel snatched his hand back, watching anxiously as the claw groped round blindly.

  Quinn laughed in delight as he watched the desperate antics of his sacrificial victims. There were five of the huge spikes now; they started to lean over. He wondered if they were the tips of some creature’s fingers.

  Moans of alarm were coming from the possessed down in the nave as they realized what they were witnessing. The first signs of panic were evident as the front rank pressed back from the edge of the ectoplasm pool.

  “Hold fast!” Quinn thundered at them. The opening into darkness wasn’t yet complete, it fluctuated as those below hurled themselves against it.

  Quinn concentrated his mind on the area where reality was distorted to breaking point.

  A huge bubble of noxious fumes burst from the centre of the ectoplasm, releasing an undulating spume of smaller ones. Powel and Fletcher ducked as a spray of ectoplasm splattered outwards. Tendrils of the stuff were wriggling against their legs now. Moving had become almost impossible, the agonising cold was squeezing in against their limbs and chests.

  A dark mass slowly shrugged its way out of the subsiding froth of bubbles. It was a metallic sphere with boxes and cylinders jutting out at odd angles. Streaks of molten nulltherm insulation were running down its sides, mingling with the wreath of ectoplasm that drooled away in slippery ribbons.

  “What the fuck is that?” Quinn demanded.

  Explosive bolts cracked loudly, and a circular hatch flew away from the sphere. A fat man in a grubby toga jumped down, splashing into the ectoplasm pool without any noticeable discomfort.

  Dariat looked round at his surroundings with considerable interest. “Bad timing?” he asked.

  Tolton walked straight through the escape pod’s walls. He stood in the ectoplasm and let out a grateful sigh. Fletcher watched in fascination
as the ectoplasm flowed up him, turning the ghost solid. He seemed so much more vital than any of the other entities struggling to fruit from the ectoplasm.

  Powel Manani’s deep laugh rocked the air. “These are your terrifying warriors?” he mocked.

  Quinn yelled in fury and sent a white fireball ripping down at the derisive Ivet supervisor. A couple of centimetres from Powel it fractured into screeching webs of energy that never quite managed to touch him. The ectoplasm heaved enthusiastically as the crackling tips plunged into it.

  A long frond of the stuff leapt up to whip round Powel’s chest. Thicker, blunt tendrils were embracing his legs, knitting together. They began to pull him downwards. “How do we kill this stuff?” he shouted at Dariat. It had taken a worrying amount of effort to deflect Quinn’s firebolt; his strength was draining away rapidly.

  “Fire,” Dariat called back. “Real fire works against them.” Something was lumbering up out of the pool next to Tolton, a creature five times his size, seven limbs unfolding from its flanks. He looked at Dariat, and the two of them linked hands. They sent a single bolt of white fire streaking into the base of the escape pod. The last two solid rocket motors ignited.

  The events into which Joshua plunged had a form similar to a sensevise.

  They were real enough as they unravelled around him, but he witnessed them all simultaneously. At the same time, he could stand back and evaluate what was happening. That wasn’t an ability the human mind could perform.

  “You are using my thought processing ability,” the singularity informed him.

  “Then I’m no longer human. It will be you who makes the decision.”

  “The essence of what you are remains unchanged. I have simply expanded your mental capacity. Consider this a supercompressed history didactic.”

  So Joshua stood at Powel Manani’s side on Lalonde as Quinn Dexter performed the sacrifice and the Ly-cilph opened a gateway into the beyond, allowing the first souls to pour through. The possessed multiplied their numbers and spread down the Juliffe. He watched Warlow talking to Quinn Dexter at Durringham spaceport and accept the payment for Lady Mac to carry him to Norfolk.

  Ralph Hiltch took flight to Ombey and unleashed the possession of Mortonridge. The liberation followed on, with Ketton island vanishing into another realm.

  “Are you the instrument that transferred the crystal entities there?” Joshua asked.

  “No. That was another similar to myself. I am aware of several within this universe, though all are in superclusters very distant from here.”

  Valisk and its descent into the mélange. Pernik. Nyvan. Koblat. Jesup.

  Kulu. Oshanko. Norfolk. Trafalgar. New California. André Duchamp. Meyer.

  Erick Thakrar. Jed Hinton. Other places, worlds and asteroids and ships and people; their lives wound together into a cohesive whole. Jay Hilton’s unauthorised escape to the Kiint home system. Their remarkable arc of planets, housing the retired observers who gathered in front of Tracy’s television, dunking chocolate biscuits into their tea as they watched the human race falling apart.

  “Dick Keaton,” Joshua said with mild jubilation. “I knew there was something odd about him.”

  “The Kiint use many specially bred observers to gather data on different species,” the singularity said. “For all their scientific prowess, they do not have my perceptive faculty. Corpus still utilises technology to amass its information. Such methods can hardly be absolute.”

  “Did they find you?”

  “Yes. I could do nothing for them, and told them so. One day they will be able to build my like by themselves. Not for some time, though. There is no need. They have achieved an admirable harmony with the universe.”

  “Yeah, so they keep telling us.”

  “Not to taunt you. They are not a malicious species.”

  “Can you show me the beyond as well?” Joshua asked. “Can you tell me how to travel through it successfully like they do?”

  “It has no distance,” the singularity said. “It only has time. That is the direction in which you must travel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This universe and all it is connected with will come to an end. Entropy carries us towards the inevitable omega point, that is why entropy exists. What is to be born next cannot be known until then. This is the time when the pattern of that which replaces it will be created, a pattern which will emerge out of mind, the collective experience of all who have lived. That is where souls go, their transcendence brings all that they are together into a single act of creation.”

  “Then why do they get stuck in the beyond?”

  “Because that is where they want to be; like the ghosts wedded to the place of their anguish, they refuse to discard the part of their life which is over. They are afraid, Joshua. From the beyond they can still see the universe they have left behind. All they have known, the condition that they were, everyone they have loved, is still obtainable, so very very close to them. They fear to leave that for the unknown future.”

  “All of us are frightened of the future. That’s human nature.”

  “But some of you venture into it with confidence. That’s why you are here today, Joshua, that’s why you found me. You believed in the future. You believed in yourself. That is the most precious possession any human can ever own.”

  “That’s it? That’s all there ever was? Faith in yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why in God’s name didn’t the Kiint tell us that? You said they weren’t malicious. What possible reason can they have for denying us that? A few simple words.”

  “Because you have to implement that knowledge as an entire species. How you do that is your own decision.”

  “It’s a bloody simple decision. You just tell them.”

  “Telling someone not to be afraid is one thing. To have them believe it at an instinctive level is quite another. In order not to be afraid of the beyond you must either understand its purpose, or have the naked conviction to move on once you encounter it. How many of your race are uneducated, Joshua? I don’t mean those of you alive now, I mean throughout history. How many have lived unfulfilled lives? How many have died in infancy or in profound ignorance? You don’t have to tell the rich and the educated, the privileged, they are the ones who will begin the great journey through the beyond of their own accord. It is the others you must convince, the ignorant masses, yet paradoxically, they are the ones hardest for you to reach. Theirs are the minds which, thanks to circumstance, have set and hardened against new concepts and ideas from an early age.”

  “But they can still be taught. They can learn to believe in themselves, everyone can. It’s never too late for that.”

  “You speak of high idealism, but still you have to implement your ideals in the real, practical world. How will you reach these people? Who will pay to provide every one of them with a personal tutor, a guru who will advance their inner spirit?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. How did other races do it?”

  “They developed socially.”

  “The Laymil didn’t, they committed suicide.”

  “Yes, but by that time they understood the nature of the beyond. Every one of them took the leap forward knowing that they still had a future.

  Their suicide was not racial extermination, a method of simply thwarting their possessing souls; they carried what they are to the omega point as one. That is what their communal society permitted them to do.”

  “I get it. The Laymil possessing souls were from a time before they reached that communal society.”

  “Yes. As most of your possessed are from earlier times. But not all, not by any means. Your race has not eliminated poverty, Joshua. You have not liberated people from physical drudgery to develop their minds. If you have a flaw in your nature, then it is that. You cling to what is comfortable, the old familiar. I suspect that is why humans have a slightly higher than average percentage of souls lingering in the beyond.”

  �
�We’ve done pretty well in the last thousand years,” he said, irked. “The Confederation is one vast middle-class estate.”

  “The parts you travel to are. And even there ‘comfortable’ does not equate to ‘satisfactory.’ You are not animals, Joshua. Yet the entire population on some of your planets perform mundane agrarian tasks.”

  “It costs to build automated factories. Global economies have to develop to a level where it becomes affordable.”

  “You have the technology to travel between the stars, and all you do when you get to your fresh world is start the old cycle over again. Only one new type of society has emerged in the last thousand years, the Edenists; and even they participate and perpetuate your economic structure. The nature of society is governed by economic circumstance; and for all of your vast collective wealth, for all your knowledge, you remain stagnant.

  Throughout your voyage here you and your crew discussed how the Tyrathca were so slow to change compared to humans. Now you have seen the Kiint home system, how far ahead of you do you think their technology lies? It is a small gap, Joshua. Molecular-level replicator technology would bring about the end of your entire economic structure. If you wanted to, how long do you think it would take the combined scientific resources of the Confederation to build a prototype replicator?”

  “I don’t know. Not long.”

  “No. Not long. The knowledge is there, but you lack the will. Although there is one final inhibiting factor we haven’t incorporated yet into your knowledge base. And it’s an important one.”

  “I have my suspicions about you,” Joshua said. “You with your avowed non-interventionist policy.”

  “Yes?”

  “How did I get here?”

  “By chance.”

  “A very long chance. A Tyrathca arkship is damaged while entering a star system devoid of any mass. Thousands of years later during the possession crisis we hear about something which might be able to solve the crisis for us. Would you like to compute the odds of that happening?”