Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  She was close enough for him to see blood frozen, crusted on the gold rings in her lips, nose, and ears. Close enough that his work light reflected dully in her eyes. Her expression wasn’t of shock, or horror, but of somewhat muted surprise. Mosasa lowered his head so that the light left her face.

  He thought briefly of trying to retrieve the bodies. But there was no point. The Mosasa clan buried their dead in space anyway. At least his family had a living relative to speak for their souls as they returned to the dark.

  He spent a long time floating by the cooling drive section of the assassin spacecraft, and said prayers for twenty-four men, women, and children. When he finished, he looked up and noticed something else in the darkness beyond the Nomad. It eclipsed stars but was far enough away that his helmet light didn’t illuminate it.

  He had a stronger lamp on his belt, and he had passed beyond caring about power conservation. He was dead, and had been for an hour. Everything else was delaying the inevitable.

  He pulled the lamp from his belt; it had a beam as wide as his fully spread hand, and could pump out lumens an order of magnitude beyond his helmet work lights. He shone it out in the direction of the shadow, and it seemed a universe of floating debris flicked into existence. A spreading galaxy of wreckage of objects ranging in size from tiny bolts and metal shavings to a sphere encased in torn tubing about twenty meters across that must have been wrenched from the drive section.

  The distant shadow was much bigger. He was able to pick it out with the lamp. Light splashed its side, dappled with shadows from the Nomad’s wreckage. Distance was hard to judge, but it seemed it could be as far as a klick away. And if that was the case, it was twice the size of the Nomad.

  To Mosasa’s eye, the derelict craft was untouched.

  The side was painted and Mosasa could see the blue and white of the old United Nations flag on the side. Beyond that, in three-meter-tall letters in a half dozen languages, Mosasa saw the name of the ship.

  Luxembourg.

  And, after staring a long time, Mosasa realized that the Nomad was still drifting toward it.

  The Luxembourg had been a ghost ship from the Genocide War. When the Nomad drifted close enough, Mosasa jumped the gap with an umbilical to anchor the two wrecks together. Even before he attached the cables, he could see that the Luxembourg was largely intact. The mirrored arrowhead that had buried itself into the Nomad and had killed his family had been an old Race-built weapon, AI driven, autonomous so none of the Race would actually be involved in a direct confrontation.

  For some reason, it had been guarding the derelict.

  When he entered the Luxembourg, he discovered that the attack that had killed the old United Nations ship had been very careful to do very little damage to the machine itself. Each hole in the skin managed to avoid holing vital equipment and ended in a vacuum-desiccated crew member. The Luxembourg had been neutralized in a matter of moments. He even found one corpse strapped to the ship’s toilet.

  The backup battery systems still had a charge, and the secondary life support still had an oxy reserve in the tanks. None of the emergency systems had come on-line. About all that was missing was a decent ship’s computer.

  It took weeks, but Mosasa revived the late twenty-first-century ship. In that time he discovered two things. The first was that the Luxembourg wasn’t strictly military. It had been run by the United Nations Intelligence Service. The second thing he discovered was deep in the belly of the ship, in the only armored compartment, flanked by incendiary devices that the crew never got the chance to fire.

  Four cylindrical crystals; four Race-built artificial intelligence devices. The machines were tied into the ship’s systems, and had gone cold and dormant.

  It was the first time that Mosasa had realized that human beings had co-opted the same heretical technologies the Race had used. Understanding that probably made the next thing he did easier.

  After days of trying to revive them, he thought of the mirrored arrowhead that had impaled the Nomad. The Race used AI-piloted drones, so the device onboard the weapon had been operational enough to pilot the drone.

  It was insane, and went against every taboo against these devices, but Mosasa was a pirate, alone, and close to the limit of his resources. If he was to survive, he needed the Luxembourg fully functional. He removed the brain from that weapon and wired it into the Luxembourg.

  “I was able to jumpstart those old AIs.” Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch and said, “But three centuries is a long time, and there’s only the one left. Me.”

  Tsoravitch shook her head, and Mosasa could tell the tale of his human origins had left an impression. She seemed to stare past him as she asked, “But you’re not him, you’re one of the AIs.”

  “I’m both. Mosasa lived long enough to emigrate to Bakunin, shortly after we recorded his identity. We needed a human consciousness to properly interact with the human world. Those memories are as much mine as they were the human Mosasa’s.”

  “What happened to the other AIs?”

  “Two were destroyed in the days before the Confederacy’s collapse.”

  “The other two?”

  “They were lost when I tried to go home.”

  “Home?”

  Mosasa nodded. “But we need to go back up to the bridge. We’re due for the next jump.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Faith of Our Fathers

  Truth is not monopolized by seniority.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

  —John Still (1543-1608)

  Date: 2526.3.27 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson hated funerals almost as much as he disliked crowds. He would have much rather been on wilderness patrol, cataloging new species, away from the small metropolis of Ashley, away from the Hall of Minds, away from the stares and the whispers.

  However, since it was his father being archived for posterity, he couldn’t avoid the ceremony. Not in good conscience, anyway.

  His dad rested on an old contragrav sled, floating a meter above the marble avenue. The sled was a relic of the founding of Salmagundi 150 years ago. The chassis had been rebuilt long ago, in line with its ceremonial repurposing. The bed was boxed in by ornate wood carvings, painted in lavish primary colors.

  Flynn walked next to his mother, behind his father, at the head of the brightly colored procession. The pride of place held by immediate family. He had to fight the urge to look behind him, to see who might be staring at him.

  “Good lord, Flynn. Who cares what they think?”

  “Shut up, Grandma.”

  The procession ended at the entrance to the Hall of Minds. It hadn’t changed since Flynn had last been here, on his first equinox. That was close to seventeen standard years ago. Four solstices come and gone, and four equinoxes as well, and before the next solstice he planned to be as far away from here as he could get.

  “Am I that bad?”

  “Give it a rest—please.”

  The Triad awaited his father’s body at the entrance; the three oldest people on Salmagundi, shaved bald so their forehead tattoos were more visible. Where most people had four or five glyphs marking each pilgrimage to the Hall of Minds, these three had dozens. Flynn only had one, and he could not imagine what now lived behind these Elders’ eyes. Their faces were expressionless, and they gazed out at the procession in a way that didn’t seem quite human.

  His father bore six glyphs on his brow. Six ancestors. Six residents of the Hall of Minds.

  The Triad led his father’s body and the procession into the central rotunda. The space was vast and echoing, occupying half the aboveground volume of the building. It easily held the thousand-plus people of the procession.

  The Triad led Flynn’s father to the center of the rotunda, where a circular dais supported a pair of square obelisks about twice the height of a man. One member of the Triad stood in front of each pillar, wh
ile the sled floated to rest between them. The last member, a woman by her voice, stood at the head of the contragrav sled and spoke.

  “We are here to commit Augustus David Jorgenson to posterity. We are ready to cast his shell aside and commit him to the archive, where this unique individual will enrich our lives in perpetuity.”

  “God, how I hate the way they say ‘unique’ . . .”

  “They do end up looking alike, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, Gram. They do.”

  The reception after Augustus Jorgenson’s funeral was held at the Jorgenson estate, another place that Flynn had avoided for over a decade. It was probably the largest house in Ashley, and one of the oldest. Fitting, perhaps, for one of the chief founding families of Salmagundi.

  Also a sign of the importance of Flynn’s father, there were at least twelve people there to eulogize him before the wake proper. Of course, each eulogy had little to do with Augustus David Jorgenson himself. Flynn had to listen to all of them, out of respect for his father, or who his father had once been.

  The series of speakers talked about the people Augustus David Jorgenson had chosen to make part of his own mind, the people he had ritually downloaded. They spoke briefly of them, and of the people they had downloaded, and those they had downloaded . . .

  Long passages became little more than a mélange of names and dates without any context. A muddy narrative that became as bland and meaningless as most of the people around him.

  It was never supposed to be like this. Gram had explained to him the founding of Salmagundi. How once they were a hundred light-years from the crumbling Confederacy, and free of the laws against the heretical technologies, the founders had decided to record their minds not to build a culture, but to preserve a knowledge base in a population that was just on the edge of sustainability. With a human mind archived, they would never again want for a sanitary engineer, an astrophysicist, a neurosurgeon, a hydroponics expert—

  Over the course of 150 years, it had become something other than necessity. It had become a combination of ancestor worship and a promise of immortality. Flynn wondered if many people knew how much a fraud it all was.

  He wondered how many cared.

  After the endless eulogy ending with the—to Flynn, ironic—toast to the Founders, he drifted through the wake like a ghost. The crowd and the conversations obligingly parted around him. No one seemed to be eager to engage Augustus’ only son in conversation. The lone tattoo on his brow was a beacon of his oddball status even to those who didn’t know him personally.

  That was fine by Flynn. He walked up to the buffet, removed a small meat-filled roll, and retreated to the empty solarium. He sat on a wrought-iron chair and looked up through the tinted glass at the small golden ball of Salmagundi’s sun.

  There were no plants here anymore, not like when he was a child, when his father was his own age. Then, this room was filled with flowers. Teased and tended by his father, when Augustus was still his dad. He had a love of the natural world, and the endless abundance of the planet Salmagundi with its two-year-long seasons. A love that Flynn had inherited.

  A love that died with Augustus’ fourth trip to the Hall of Minds.

  Flynn had been barely old enough to understand the change that accompanied his father’s fourth glyph. When he had come back from his turn at the solstice festival, he was colder. More like the ancient automatons of the Triad. His voice lost passion, and inflection, and affection.

  And he had let his flowers die.

  The seasons turned again and the following equinox came with the associated festivals. Like the solstices, the equinoxes marked the time when pilgrims came from all corners of Salmagundi to visit the Hall of Minds. During the festival, the population of Ashley doubled, crowding with a press of people coming to select a new tattoo for their brow, and a new ancestor to merge into their own mind.

  It also marked the time when those who had reached their fifteenth year since the prior festival were expected to select their first ancestor and become an adult. By then Flynn had been almost seventeen, the oldest child there to come of age, and the first selected to walk into the Hall of Minds. He hadn’t the authority—or the courage—to refuse. All he had been able to do was choose which ancestor he would come to host.

  “Here you are.”

  Flynn turned and saw his mother standing in the doorway, facing him. He wished he had taken a glass of scotch. “Hello, Mother.”

  “You’re ignoring our guests. That isn’t polite.”

  “God forbid we’re rude, chicky.”

  “Gram, that’s my mother.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I needed some time to myself—”

  “Flynn, you’re by yourself all the time. You live out in the wilderness. Can you please be social?”

  “They don’t want to talk to me. You know that. I make them uncomfortable.”

  “Uh-huh, sonny, the feeling’s mutual, and you know it.”

  “You can change that—”

  “Don’t start—”

  “Come back, be a part of society. Isn’t there someone—”

  “Stop it!”

  “You’re rejecting the lives of everyone who came before us, their knowledge, their expertise, your father—”

  Flynn stood up. “My father died eighteen years ago!”

  His mother took a step back. Flynn could hear a few gasps back in the reception area. He didn’t care any longer.

  “Son—”

  “Where was the memorial when the Triad jacked him into the Hall and diluted his soul to the point of nonexistence? What about you? Did you mourn him the morning when he couldn’t remember what was him and what was a decade-old recording?”

  “Please lower your voice.”

  “Why? Everybody here knows what I think. Hell, everyone here is the same fucking person. The same tepid average of everyone the consensus made important.” Flynn pushed past his mother and faced the crowd, who was now all staring at him. “Here’s a little game, folks. That same shocked expression you’re all wearing, is that you, or someone you downloaded?”

  He slammed the door on the way out.

  Flynn had walked the winding path into the overgrown estate gardens for about fifteen minutes before the female voice in his head spoke up. “You sure know how to make an exit.”

  “Do you enjoy dwelling on the obvious, Gram?”

  “Well, you made me feel a little unwelcome back there.”

  Flynn turned a corner and faced a secluded patio hidden by yellow-green foliage. A stone bench was nestled, almost buried, in a nest of vines, facing a long-silent fountain. On the bench sat a young woman about 150 centimeters tall, with almond-shaped green eyes and straight black hair cut in an asymmetrical diagonal. She wore the same black leather jacket, pants, and boots she always wore. She looked up at him and said, “And you know I don’t like it when you call me Gram. It makes me feel old.”

  Flynn shook his head distractedly. “Yeah, sure.”

  She looked down at herself. “Do you mind? I waited until we were alone again.”

  “No, Tetsami, you’re fine.” He sat down next to the apparition.

  His experience in the Hall of Minds, as far as he could tell, was unique. It was supposed to be a melding, a merging of an elder’s knowledge and experience with your own. In most cases, it also meant the merging of those that elder had himself merged with, and so on, and so on . . . Achieving some sort of higher unified consciousness.

  With Flynn, a combination of his own panicked resistance and his choice of Kari Tetsami manifested itself differently. Most people—most recordings of people, that is—downloaded from the Hall of Minds knew what was happening, expected it, understood it. Tetsami’s mind, the oldest one in the archive, had been stored before Salmagundi had established itself, and before the biannual rite at the Hall of Minds existed.

  If anything, the event panicked Tetsami as much as Flynn, and she escaped into some distant part of his brain. They re
mained two separate individuals. Flynn, and his twenty-five-year-old great-great-great-great-grandmother.

  “Look,” Flynn said, “I’m sorry if it sounded like I included you in that outburst.”

  “I know.” Tetsami patted his hand, sort of. Her visual manifestation couldn’t actually touch him, though he felt it inside. “I’m in there with you.”

  “Ever think it would have been better if the download went the way it was supposed to?”

  “Hell, no. You know that creeps me out as much as it does you. I’m me, you’re you, and let’s keep it that way.”

  Flynn shook his head. “I just don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

  “Standing up to their stupid ancestor worship isn’t a crime.”

  “Yeah, but it might cost me my job.”

  Tetsami sighed. “I was kind of hoping that you didn’t notice Robert was there.”

  “We were staring right at him, you know. Only one set of eyes between us.” Robert Sheldon was manager of the wilderness corps, Flynn’s employer, and about as conservative an example of Ashley high society as you could find. He was a lifelong colleague of Flynn’s father—he would hesitate to use the term friend—and probably only allowed Flynn to work there as a favor. Between his father’s death and his outburst, Flynn thought that Robert would have little reason to keep him employed.

  “Come on, your father just died. Don’t you think that’s enough reason to cut you some slack?”

  Flynn chuckled. “I know you’re old-fashioned, but you’ve seen enough of things to realize my people don’t see death quite the same way you do.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “I’ve seen plenty of religions that promise resurrection. Yours is the only one I’ve ever seen that delivers.” She leaned back and stared at the sky, even though Flynn knew the only thing she saw was what his own eyes were looking at. “You’d think my particular situation would make me a little more sympathetic to them.”

  “So, any suggestion how to deal with this?”