Eternity's Mind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Other Onthos came forward shaking and confused as if they had just awakened from a deep slumber. “We surrender,” said Ohro. “Take us back to Father Peter and Mother Estarra. We have many things to tell them.”

  Though she could feel the raw wound inside herself after what Rod’h and Tamo’l had just done, Osira’h also had another urgent need. “And Prince Reynald?”

  Ohro looked at her, pondered for a moment, and said, “He has a different disease, but we will see what we can do.”

  CHAPTER

  125

  ELISA ENTURI

  The bloaters in the cluster sparked like fireworks, their nuclei flaring bright in random signals—but Elisa cared only about the damage they had done to Lee Iswander’s scout pod. She had watched him on the comm screen, heard him begging her—and then the energy burst slammed into the vulnerable craft. All his systems had failed, and now his pod drifted dark and silent, showing no energy signature whatsoever, no engines, no comm, no life-support readings.

  Elisa sprang into action. She forgot her ultimatum to Garrison because none of that mattered. Iswander was in trouble! She activated her engines and raced toward the tumbling pod, hoping he wasn’t dead. His life-support systems had been knocked offline, but he should be able to survive for a while at least … long enough for her to save him. She had to save him.

  Even though Elisa’s ship wasn’t a large vessel, its cargo bay was sufficient to receive the small scout pod. As soon as she had sealed the bay doors and cycled the atmosphere, she ran to extract him from the tiny ship. His electronic systems were down, and if she couldn’t activate the hatch, she would cut through the hull itself, break open the pod, and release him. She would find him inside, glad to see her, exuberant and forgiving. Together, the two of them could stand against the arrogant fools who ordered him to shut down his industries. She had devoted so much of her energy to this man, hitching herself to his star. If he failed, then she would fail. He was her last chance.

  The pod’s hatch wouldn’t open, no matter what she tried. She pounded on it, but heard no response from inside. He should have been able to use a manual release, unless he was hurt or unconscious.

  From the piloting deck, she could hear voices over her ship’s comm system, people demanding to know what was happening, but she didn’t have time to answer them. She had other priorities.

  She ran to get a set of laser cutters and sliced into the control circuitry so she could use the external lock. When Elisa finally breached the pod’s seal and accessed the manual release, she managed to open the hatch, which sighed open.

  “Sir! Can you hear me?” She wanted him to help her, but she received no response. He wasn’t moving in there.

  She found Iswander inside, slumped and motionless. He wore no protective suit, didn’t even have an oxygen mask—just his business attire, as if he had meant to attend a meeting. He must have rushed out to talk her down, and now she recalled everything he had said, how he’d commanded her to reconsider her course of action.

  Elisa had only meant to do what was necessary, assuming that her edgy defiance would make Garrison back away, because Garrison Reeves, of all people, would have known that she was not bluffing.

  What had she done?

  She shook Iswander by the shoulders, but got no response. His skin was pale, his eyes closed, his mouth slack. She placed her ear against his chest, touched his neck and found a pulse. He was breathing, still alive—but unresponsive.

  She remembered when Aelin had been caught in one of the bloater surges. He had been rendered temporarily catatonic from the neural overload, but the green priest had been connected to his treeling at the time, hence the destructive surge in his mind. Aelin had been broken afterward, somewhat insane, his head filled with delusional visions. Stray thoughts from Eternity’s Mind?

  She could not let that happen to Iswander.

  “Sir!” She touched his face, she shook him. With her thumb, she peeled back his eyelid, but his eyes were rolled back. She pulled him out of the scout pod and dragged him to the cabin of her ship. She laid him out on the bunk, tried to make him comfortable. Her heart was pounding, desperate to do something else.

  Determined, she flew her ship back to the admin hub, broadcasting a distress call. “Prepare the doctors! I need medical attention right away. Mr. Iswander is injured.” She swallowed hard. “He needs treatment—now.”

  As soon as she docked and shut her systems down, the doctors hurried forward into the launching bay to take the patient. Back when a catatonic Aelin had been brought in, they had tried everything possible, and none of their efforts had worked. With Elisa following close behind them, they rushed a gurney pallet along as they attached monitoring systems and electrodes to Iswander’s head.

  Pannebaker also came in, deeply concerned, but from the flare behind his narrowed eyes, Elisa could see that the deputy blamed her for what had happened. “He went out to stop you, Elisa. If you hadn’t been so stupid, if you’d just listened when he—”

  “Shut up. While you just sat here ready to surrender, I tried to save us all. Mr. Iswander was caught in a bloater discharge, and I could do nothing to stop that, but at least I tried to keep him from losing everything.” She gritted her teeth and drew a deep breath. “And we’re going to keep trying to protect this facility.”

  To add insult to injury, the Prodigal Son also flew to the admin hub. Garrison and Orli brought Seth in with them. Princess Arita’s green priest friend carried his treeling and dispatched reports of what was happening there.

  Elisa gritted her teeth to see the green priest. Thanks to him, now everyone across the Confederation knew about their face-off, knew that the great industrialist had resisted these capricious demands, and now lay helpless. Rage swelled within her, and there were so many targets for it.

  “It’s over, Elisa,” Garrison said. “Time to make amends and try to salvage your life and your relationships. You have to face what you’ve done—to clan Duquesne, to Seth, to everyone else you’ve hurt.”

  She stiffened. “What I’ve done to Seth? I only ever wanted the best for Seth.” Her own son looked at her with disappointment. She realized that only a few hours ago Seth had seen her ready to blow him up along with everyone else, just to make a point. Earlier, he had watched her threaten Jess and Cesca at Academ when she had tried to steal him away.

  Elisa struggled with an unfamiliar backlash of guilt, and she turned to the boy. “I haven’t done right by you. I know that, and I apologize.” Then she faced Garrison, hardened her voice. “But for you and for everything else, I had my reasons. If you’d had your head on straight from the start, you and I could have gone far. We could have been important. But you made me do it by myself. See what I accomplished—imagine what else I might have done if everyone hadn’t interfered.”

  “We can see what you accomplished,” Garrison said, his expression dark. “It’s nothing to be proud of.”

  She wanted to lash back at him, but the doctors interrupted her. “We finished our scans.” They issued their report indiscriminately, so that everyone could hear. “His mind is unresponsive. It’s worse than what we saw with the green priest. There is only a very small chance Mr. Iswander will ever recover.”

  Collin said, “It’s like what happened to Kotto Okiah at Fireheart Station. When he connected with Eternity’s Mind, it was too much for him.” He shook his head. “He never came out of it, and his body died a few days later.”

  Elisa showed her disappointment to the doctors, realizing that she’d always known they couldn’t do anything. From the moment she had seen Iswander’s unconscious form inside the blasted pod, she understood his prospects.

  “The green priest recovered, though,” she said. “Even after Aelin was damaged, he flew out and immersed himself inside a bloater. That changed him, brought him back.” She whipped her gaze to Orli Covitz. “And you too! You came here dying. You should be dead from that Onthos plague, but you went inside a bloater, and you came out healed.�
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  “That was a desperate circumstance,” Orli pointed out. “And the bloaters are different now, more aware—”

  “What other chance do we have?” Elisa demanded. She turned to the doctors. “I’m getting an exosuit. I’ll fly him out to the nearest bloater.”

  “That’s not wise,” said the doctor.

  “You said yourself, there’s little other hope.” She turned to glare at Pannebaker, Garrison, Orli. She didn’t care what they all thought, and she certainly wasn’t interested in Arita or their pompous warnings. “Do I need to threaten you?” She waited for someone to argue, but Iswander was completely catatonic, and they could all see he had very little chance. “I’m taking him.”

  Pannebaker gave a brief nod. “In the meantime, since I’m in charge of operations, I’m calling a full halt in compliance with the moratorium imposed by the King and Queen. The bloaters are clearly hazardous, and we will reassess the dangers. There will be no more ekti extraction for the time being.”

  “Thank you,” Arita said, in a low whisper.

  Elisa couldn’t be concerned with that. She took the motionless Iswander and carried him back to her ship with very little assistance from the others. She didn’t bother to look back at them as she propped him in the second seat in the piloting deck, activated her engines, and flew out into the bloater cluster.

  The drifting nodules sparkled with erratic pulses of light, as if the space brain were filled with furious thoughts. One such outburst had damaged Iswander’s mind, and she hoped that the so-called blood of the cosmos would also save him.

  In the complex around them, she looked at the industrial operations that had now gone dark, just waiting. The exosuited workers, the ekti extractors, the cargo ships did nothing, paralyzed without a bold and decisive leader like Iswander. Elisa wished they all had the same dedication she did. How did they expect to get ahead in their lives and in their careers? How did they intend to make progress without putting in the effort, without taking the risks? Iswander had taught her that all along, and she understood full well that one had to be willing to fail spectacularly in order to hope for success.

  Of course, Elisa would take the risk.

  She flew directly to the closest bloater, hoping that another discharge would not strike her vessel and leave her as brain-damaged as Iswander. She couldn’t count on anyone else to do what was necessary, and Elisa knew exactly what actions were required.

  She brought her ship close to the nodule, whose mottled outer membrane bore indecipherable patterns. She saw flickers of pulsing energy deep inside the swirling murk. That fluid inside the bloater was more than just stardrive fuel; it was protoplasm in a giant brain cell. It was hope, maybe even a miracle.

  She stabilized her ship and then spent a tedious half hour putting an exosuit on Lee Iswander. His arms were loose, his legs floppy, his eyes still closed. She sealed the helmet, then donned her own suit. Together, they would go inside the bloater, immerse themselves. It was the only chance they had.

  Tethered to him and holding his limp arm, she opened the airlock hatch, and the two drifted into space. She held Iswander, spoke to him over the comm, but of course he didn’t respond. Not yet. But she held on to hope. The bloater would save him, she was sure of it.

  They drifted up against the giant, soft membrane. Elisa had to have faith and determination.

  Cutting through the membrane was easy, and they climbed inside as protoplasm spilled out into space around them. Aelin had done this. Orli Covitz had done it. Surely Elisa could do better.

  The two suited figures were drawn into the cell of the awakening space brain, sinking into the blood of the cosmos. Elisa immersed herself completely as the nodule crackled and pulsed with burgeoning energy. She pulled Lee Iswander deeper inside with her, and the membrane quickly sealed itself.

  * * *

  They never re-emerged.

  Hours later, Elisa’s silent and empty ship drifted away while the bloaters continued sparkling and flashing. The thoughts of Eternity’s Mind continued to impose order on the universe and strengthen the laws of physics against the Shana Rei.

  But Lee Iswander and Elisa Enturi were no longer part of the equation.

  CHAPTER

  126

  EXXOS

  The Shana Rei were blasted and battered by the titanic counterattacks that struck them from the Fireheart nebula and from within the void itself. Even as Exxos rallied, countless black robots had been annihilated; worse, he saw the creatures of darkness crippled and broken, unable to fight back and unable to flee.

  The shadows had wanted to unmake the cosmos, to eliminate all life that caused them pain. But the human and Ildiran forces had attacked and wounded them in their dark dimension, unleashing so many sun bombs that they caused considerable harm.

  At the same time, across the Spiral Arm the awakening Eternity’s Mind strengthened the fabric of the universe, building invisible cages of structure and life that could withstand the flailing chaos of the Shana Rei. Their shadow clouds were collapsing into newborn stars, driven by the clusters of gigantic ganglia.

  As the shadows reeled from that, the chain of supernovas erupting inside the nebula was orders of magnitude more devastating to them—and now the faeros had found a channel directly into the deepest black corners of the void, flooding in to destroy countless more Shana Rei, incinerating them from within.

  Exxos and all his counterparts would be annihilated along with the creatures of darkness—and he could not allow that to happen.

  The last remaining Klikiss robots had been painted into a corner by the Shana Rei, and they were treated as captives as much as allies. The shadows had destroyed many of the original robots by capricious whim, but they had also created millions of duplicates with their manifested dark matter.

  Although Exxos had once considered the Shana Rei to be an undefeatable enemy, his robots had combined millions of processors to prepare an illicit weapon that would beat the monstrous shadows. Even so, he had not intended to use it—not yet. He had hoped that if they cooperated and helped to eliminate the humans and Ildirans, just as they had eliminated the progenitor Klikiss race long ago, then the shadows would grant them their promised reward. But Exxos had never truly believed their promises.

  On the other hand, he had never believed the Shana Rei could be defeated by outside forces either. And now they were obviously wounded and reeling.

  It was time. One last chance.

  The harm the shadows had already suffered was immeasurable. More than half of the Shana Rei were gone, unable to comprehend their own near-mortal wounds. Right now, the creatures of darkness were the weakest they had been since reemerging into the universe. Now, the last of them retreated into the sanctuary of their protected void. They were unfocused, confused—and vulnerable.

  Exxos and all the identical black robots came to the same conclusion instantaneously. Over millennia, the robots had always been willing to turn at a moment’s notice, to find a vulnerability and strike. Now was their perfect chance.

  Exxos gambled. He surmised that the Shana Rei might recover and grow strong again. If the robots fought alongside the creatures of darkness, helped them to escape, rebuild, and come back, then they might eventually strike the Spiral Arm again. It was a possibility … and, oh, how Exxos wanted that!

  But if the Shana Rei did become powerful once more, then the robots would be mere playthings and slaves all over again. Exxos would never trust the shadows, and the robots would never escape.

  Yes, this was their best opportunity.

  For months, the combined processing power of millions of robot minds had developed their unorthodox entropy nullifiers, the reality-crystallization effect that required the highest-order calculations of exotic physics. Unable to guarantee that it would work, the robots would have only one chance, only one test.

  Now that the Shana Rei were battered, this was an opportunity he could not ignore. The robots simultaneously put the plan into effect. They would a
nnihilate the Shana Rei, and then they would all escape.

  The pulsing inkblots with angry glowing eyes were all around them, but the shadows were desperate and paid little attention to the numerous Exxos copies that remained. He knew the Shana Rei would sacrifice every one of the robots if such a massacre would give the shadows one more moment of continued existence.

  Exxos meant to take that away from them.

  As the creatures of darkness retreated into their empty void, the swarms of robot copies manipulated physics, activated their calculated algorithms, and triggered the net that changed reality around the Shana Rei. The process nullified the entropy that formed their very being.

  The swelling, shapeless black smears shuddered, squirmed. Their representational eyes blazed, then went dim as the inkblots fossilized. Their framework of existence crystalized into sharp order—and they shattered.

  In the emptiness between dimensions, all of the Shana Rei ceased to exist—in exactly the way they had wanted to uncreate the real universe.

  Exxos watched what was happening, unable to believe his perfect and complete success as the creatures of darkness simply evaporated, as if they had never existed at all. He experienced a moment of total victory.

  But when the Shana Rei faded, all of the new dark matter that they had manifested out of the chaos was also erased. The atoms they had created through sheer force of will dissolved and returned into the energy of the void.

  Thus, every one of the black robots they had assembled with such dark matter were similarly erased. Hundreds of thousands of Exxos copies simply vanished—every one that the Shana Rei had manifested.

  After so many devastating battles, so many sacrifices in the great combat zones in space, only a single original Exxos remained.

  Exxos, the last one, was left floating alone in the infinite void, an impossible speck in a universe of nothingness.…

  CHAPTER

  127

  TOM ROM

  The symptoms of the Onthos plague manifested in Zoe with devastating swiftness. Tom Rom was all too familiar with the disease’s progress.