“Our duty is to preserve the integrity of the Noosphere,” Chloe said calmly. “It’s now in crisis—that much must be obvious to you.”
“When did this happen?” Nina asked.
“You mean the episode on Earth?” said Lucian.
“Of course she means that!”
I stood a little taller than both of them, was larger built. But they were not intimidated.
“Most recently,” Lucian said. “A matter of hours ago. Prime Arbiter Miushme-Adewoyin has only recently emerged from communion. That’s how we have knowledge of it.”
I no longer felt any physical weakness, and I had an urge to grab the two of them and demand they tell us exactly what they wanted of us.
Chloe simply raised a hand and said, “Come.”
And then, without apparent transition, we were moving along another tunnel of light which rose and opened out until we were looking down on a vast oval concourse, bone-white, surrounded by banded tiers of silver and gold that were obviously buildings or habitations for those who lived on the Noosphere. Overhead in the black sky hung the luminous Earth, clouds shrouding its vast oceans and sweeping landmasses.
I could no longer see it without thinking of the warped lifeforms that scuttled on its surfaces and swarmed in its oceans and atmosphere. I could not stop thinking about the thing in the lake.
Nina was clinging on to my arm. We stood on a sweeping platform overlooking the concourse. This, Chloe began to tell us, was the ceremonial heart of the Noosphere, where the people would gather for the public appearances of the Advocates on celebratory occasions or whenever significant pronouncements were made. Stalked optics loomed like pendulous flowers above us, ready to transmit such occasions to the inhabitants of the Settled Worlds. And behind us was the Shrine of Shrines itself.
We turned. A white dome arched upwards, its central spire a fluted ivory spear rising impossibly high. A portal in the dome pulsed open, a dark oval in the eggshell surface. Chloe and Lucian led us towards it.
Everything was vivid yet a little unreal. My dislocation was profound and I could not speak. The air hung motionless and sterile around us, nothing moving apart from ourselves. I caught a scent of Nina’s femaleness and wanted to bury myself in her there and then.
Chloe and Lucian led us into the dome. There was a warm, almost reddish darkness, and again we seemed to glide along. Then everything brightened and we were standing at the centre of the dome, its entire vast surface blistered with countless multifaceted optics displaying an enormous variety of images. Some showed the faces of the Noocracy in ceremonial or public duties; others displayed panoramic views of thronged city streets, meremeadows, crater plantations, wheeled habitations moving as one across a storm-racked plain; yet others held single individuals seated before prayer terminals, communing with the afterlife.
There were thousands upon thousands of them, the images shifting and changing even as I stared. These were living pictures of the multitudes of the Settled Worlds in their multifarious guises, everyone from the elevated and protected in the most favoured circumstances to the debased and desperate in neglected corners of every inhabited surface throughout the physical realm of Noospace.
And there was more. I had a sense of the babble of their voices, the pleas, demands, fears, longings—the entire spectrum of human emotion was there, mute, on the screens, those in shrines urgent for comfort and guidance. Immediately before us was something that looked like a translucent sphere, holding at its centre something resembling a dual prayer terminal. And yet I knew, perhaps because Chloe and Lucian were telling me, that it was quite the reverse—a receptacle rather than a transmitter for the receiving of the prayers of those multitudes on the optics. This was the Shrine of Shrines.
Nina seemed as overwhelmed as I. We were dwarfed by the optics, by the sheer population they displayed and the enormity of their needs.
“This is where the Advocates receive the communions of the people,” Chloe told us. “Here they can be directly aware of the true feelings and wishes of those they serve at any given time.”
“They receive the prayers?” Nina said.
“They act as a filter,” Lucian replied. “Only humans can truly comprehend the desires of other humans. The Noosphere itself will ultimately make decisions according to those desires, but the Advocates are an essential personal element, the bridge between the individual and the communality.”
“And of course,” Chloe added, “the personal outweighs the public for most people at any given time. The Advocates are better able to advise us of particular cases that may merit urgent attention.”
“I want to be sure I understand this,” Nina said. “The Advocates can take in all that up there?” She pointed to the optics. “Every bit of it?”
“It’s channelled through them to the Noosphere itself,” Lucian said. “So they obtain a fleeting sense of it. Even when they aren’t here the Noosphere continues to function efficiently, but there’s no longer any personal element to the communion. And the Advocates may not be as intimately informed of the needs of the people as their position would dictate.”
The images were innumerable, too much to absorb with the eye alone. I wondered exactly how the Advocates received individual communions through their shrine. Did they dip into particular prayers at random or let the whole panoply wash through them, bursting with desires and urgencies? If so, no wonder they had eventually gone mad.
“In previous times,” Chloe was saying, “the Advocates came here regularly, often daily, never less than once a full blue moon. Julius and Orela followed this tradition at the start of their tenure. They were devout in the pursuit of their duties. But later they began to falter, spending more time in travel, in the pursuit of their own preoccupations.”
“Naturally,” said Lucian, “it’s important that the Advocates do visit the worlds of the Noospace, making their physical presence manifest. No one would deny them that. But in recent decades Julius and Orela gradually began to dispense even with ceremonial visits and now spend all their time either travelling privately—often in secret—or in retreat at Icarus. They haven’t been here in a quarter of a century. As a result the Shrine of Shrines has lain empty.”
“I don’t understand,” said Nina. “If this is true, then surely the people would have noticed or known, wouldn’t they?”
Chloe shook her head. “We’ve endeavoured to ensure that the Noosphere continues to fulfil the needs of the people. And the Advocates are adept at implying that they are still carrying out their duties.”
I could not take my eyes off the shrine within the sphere. Its surfaces were pearly, pristine, folded and arched and curlicued like some impossibly complex flower. The Advocates would sit at its very centre, living things within its petals.
“Perhaps they’ve simply had enough of serving others,” I remarked.
“That may well be so,” replied Lucian. “In which case, why did they not retire years ago? The Advocacy is a burden few can bear for more than half a lifespan. But Julius and Orela will not relinquish their positions. At the same time, their private conduct shows increasing degeneracy.”
“It’s a consequence of their age,” Chloe said. “Advocates are no more proof against the inexorability of physical and mental decline than any of us.”
It seemed to me that they were being far too blithe about the voracious mental demands of the office itself. Though I was sure that none of the thousands of faces on the screens—and they kept changing even as I stared—could see or hear us, it was hard to hold on to the conviction that the four of us were alone in the dome. How would it have been if we were inside the shrine, directly connected to every one of them?
“We believe,” Lucian was saying, “that their instability represents perhaps a fatal danger to the Noosphere. But you must decide for yourselves.”
“What about the Augmenters?” I said. “Are they really about to attack the Noosphere?”
“Their fleet is on its way,” Chloe said,
“as you’ve seen. We don’t approve of their philosophy—especially in such extremities as the suprahuman abomination—but it may be necessary to reach an accommodation with them. For the good of the human race at large.”
These were weasel words. There was nothing on her face to indicate that this had been a difficult decision. She looked like a child mouthing adult words whose significance she did not really understand. But I knew better than to be fooled by appearances.
“Are they planning on attacking the Noosphere?” I asked again.
“It’s better you discover their purpose from their own words and actions.”
“Wait a minute,” I said swiftly, fearful that they might switch us there and then back into Bezile or Tunde or Imrani. “Why should we trust you? We only know what you’ve chosen to let us experience.”
“What you’ve dreamt has actually happened,” Chloe said. “Can you deny that you know it to be true?”
I couldn’t, but I wasn’t ready to give in that easily. “How do we know that this isn’t just a scheme to allow you two to take over as Advocates?”
Chloe laughed, the first time I had witnessed a spontaneous display of emotion from either of them.
“The new Advocates already exist,” she told me. “In more than embryo.”
“On Elydia’s ship?” said Nina.
Chloe nodded. “Julius and Orela did not lie about that. They’re in the womb. Waiting to be born.”
• • •
Imrani surfaced from unconsciousness. It took a moment for him to orientate himself: he was webbed into a seat in one of the skulldecks of the phoenix. Beside him sat Felix, who was staring out through the observation lens. In the near distance, straight ahead, Jupiter shone bronze in the darkness of space.
His limbs were stiff from the effects of the toxin, his head fuzzy. He closed his eyes again, and I made my presence felt:
“Are you all right?”
He was surprised by my intervention, but his grogginess blunted his reaction. I had the sense that there was no lasting damage: the threader’s venom had been designed to paralyse rather than kill.
Nina was present, too, and I allowed her to take the lead in calming him. Gradually Imrani rose to some semblance of normal alertness. The skulldeck console showed a close-up of the cloud-streaked disc of Callisto. There was a fleet in orbit around it. It was far smaller than the Augmenter armada we had seen in the Valley of the Dead.
“So,” said Felix, “you’re awake at last.”
The smile was as broad as ever, but it never showed in his eyes.
“Comfortable enough?” he said, using his hands to adjust the webbing around Imrani’s chest.
“Where are we headed?” Imrani asked, at Nina’s urging.
“In good time,” Felix said softly, the big fingers of his hands paused near Imrani’s throat. “Are you thirsty? Threader venom sometimes has that effect. Would you like some water?”
He spoke without emotion, without concern. Imrani shook his head.
The lens showed several of the armada’s ships, the closest a big black bell that wafted silvery fronds as it kept pace with the phoenix. Felix murmured something to the console, then turned back to Imrani.
“You’ve slept through most of the voyage,” he remarked. A studied sigh. “I rather envy you that. Interplanetary travel is really rather tiresome.”
Imrani did his best to indicate the other ships of the armada.
“Where did they come from?” he asked.
Felix refocused the lens so that we could see a swathe of the ships. There were hundreds of them, more even than we had seen at Acheron.
“From the Outer Reaches,” he replied. “From the many small worlds and habitats far beyond the Noosphere where the persecuted found sanctuary after the purges.”
“Are you going to wage war?”
He made a sound like a laugh. “Let’s hope that won’t be necessary. Elydia can explain better than I. I think it’s time we joined her.”
He retracted the webbing and helped Imrani to his feet. Though Imrani’s haziness had largely cleared, he moved stiffly and Felix had to help him along. His big hand fitted almost entirely around Imrani’s bicep, and it was as if we were being marched rather than led to the doorvalve.
A spiralway glided us down to the bridgehead. Elydia stood in front of the pilot’s station. There were two Augmenters with her, one a bulky figure standing at her side, the other oddly perched in the co-pilot’s seat.
The seated man was spindly, almost skeletal, his hands splayed across the control nodules, long flexible fingers effortlessly accessing information from the optics and sensitories. He had a narrow pale face with a protuberant nose and mouth that gave him a fish-like appearance. He wore a smaller version of the pilot’s neural hood.
The other Augmenter was amply folded in shimmering silver robes, skin gleaming with a purplish sheen. The woman—it was clear at proximity that she was indeed female—appeared pregnant in the ancient human sense, but the umbilical curved up into a face-mask, and a pungent reek emanated from her.
Elydia smiled warmly as Imrani was led forward, and she provided the introductions. The co-pilot was called Jagdavido, a “Mentalent” whose enhanced nervous system enabled him to process data with a speed and efficiency far beyond any mere biomechanical. Jagdavido, engrossed in his task, eyes rolled in his head like a Devout drunk on communion, did not acknowledge them. The woman was an ammonia-breather who had once inhabited the Vaporous Swamps of Titan’s North Pole. Her name was Addomatis, and she was two hundred and forty years old, Elydia told us, the oldest survivor of the Augmenter purges. She had undergone four “bodily restructurings” during her long lifetime.
Addomatis made no sound except for slow snuffling intakes and exhalations of breath; the sharp odour of ammonia only partially masked a ranker smell. Imrani involuntarily took a step back from her. The bruised lids on her lozenge eyes opened and closed slowly; it was hard to tell whether she was listening or dozing. Jagdavido, by contrast, was a bustle of contained energy, fingers constantly twitching at their tasks. Beside him the pilot sat rigid, head enveloped in a hood so big it hid her face, its filaments directly connected to the ship’s control cortex.
Elydia was pleasantness personified. She wore a dark green robe of some rough material, and her hair was done up in a topknot. She resembled a warrior queen from the distant past of Earth.
Imrani was unnerved by his proximity to the two Augmenters, and I took the opportunity to speak through him:
“What do you want with me?”
“What?” Elydia’s tone implied that the answer should have been obvious. “I want you to witness our return to the fold of humanity.”
“Are you going to attack?”
She feigned shock at the suggestion.
“Your ships are armed. I know that.”
“A prudent protective measure,” she said. “We come to offer peace and harmonious coexistence. I detect a new steeliness in you. Perhaps you continue to doubt us. But we’re bringing the people their new Advocates.”
She indicated the rear of the bridgehead. The spiralway had blocked sight of it on our descent, but now I saw that the womb had been installed there.
It stood upright, supported by a descending tangle of fibres from the ship’s control system. Its swollen surface was now stretched so thin that it was possible to make out the vague contours of the faces within it. A man and a woman, naked but with hair already on their heads. Though their eyes were almost certainly closed, they seemed to strain against the sac that contained them, as if eager to burst into life.
“Are you teaching them how to fly the ship?” I said acidly.
Elydia laughed. “They aren’t sentient. Not yet. It’s merely a means by which we can continuously monitor their status. They’re almost at the end of their term.”
“And then what?”
It was Nina who asked the question through Imrani. Elydia gave him a thoughtful stare, then seemed to shr
ug away her curiosity.
“They’re our peace offering to the peoples of the Noosphere. A token of good faith.”
“They don’t belong to you,” I said.
This surprised her. “How would you know that? They couldn’t have been created in the first place without our assistance.”
I sensed Chloe and Lucian’s presence in the background, and I immediately asked them: Is this true? There was a silence, and then Lucian confirmed that “Augmenter methods” had been used to make the womb self-sustaining. He conveyed the impression that it was a necessary bargain against the threat of Julius and Orela’s insanity. Both he and Chloe were adamant that the man and woman inside it were not in any way Augmented themselves. There was an unaccustomed insistence and urgency to their presences that spoke of sincerity—or at least a sincere desire that Nina and I should believe them.
At this point Jagdavido began a strange bleating noise that was like a high-pitched purring.
“Contact from the Jovian fleet,” he said. “High Arbiter Salvadorian wishes to communicate.”
He spoke rapidly in a piping voice that lacked nuance and emphasis.
“Put him on,” Elydia said, thumbing a large optic on the control ridge. It opened, showing Salvadorian and several others. He wore his arbiter’s robes but he was obviously on the bridgehead of a ship.
“Greetings,” said Elydia lightly. She told him her name, then announced: “We come in peace.”
I wondered if she was mocking him, a mockery that came from the knowledge that her ships outnumbered his tenfold.
Salvadorian’s grave face did not alter. “Your fleet is armed,” he said. “You’re here without our consent.”
Elydia maintained a cheerful expression, an almost jaunty tone. “We’re carrying the new Advocates. We intend only to deliver them safely to the Noosphere.”
Salvadorian and those around him did not noticeably react to this.
“Julius and Orela are our Advocates,” Salvadorian said. “This is an unwarranted intrusion into Jove-space.”
Elydia settled herself in the optic seat, leaning forward as if she was conducting a casual conversation with an old acquaintance.
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