[Apotheosis 03] Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  “You make it sound easy.”

  Her other self placed her head back down on her chest and said, “If it was easy, this would have happened before we both nearly died.”

  “I guess so.” Toni II bit her lip. “What about Proteus?”

  “What about them?”

  “Will I have to . . .”

  “Only if you ask for it.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “I won’t let that come between us. I won’t let anything do that.”

  Toni II stared up at the stars. “Just us against the universe ?”

  “Just us,” Toni said.

  The return to the Wisconsin was an unwelcome return to reality, or what was masquerading as reality nowadays. If she could have, she would have prolonged their orbit around Schwitzguebel, if not forever, at least a bit longer than they did. But she couldn’t abandon everyone, especially since she bore some responsibility for Stefan and what he had done. She knew, without discussing it, that her Protean self felt the same. They felt a duty here almost as strong as they felt toward each other. And, as inconvenient as that was, without that part of themselves, they probably wouldn’t feel nearly as deeply for each other.

  Whatever happens now, though, we have that.

  They walked out of the air lock, and Mallory was waiting for them. Toni II felt Toni’s hand brush hers and wondered what the priest would make of their relationship.

  “Captain,” Mallory said to Toni. He turned to her and said, “Lieutenant.” His eyes were still shadowed from the bruising vacuum, and Toni II figured that was how he was telling them apart. There was a distant, almost fatalistic look in his eyes, and just as she recognized it, Toni squeezed her hand.

  “What is it?” Captain Toni asked him.

  “You were concerned for our mission to the surface.”

  Toni II thought of the people that were probably lost now, Parvi, Kugara, Flynn, Nickolai, Dörner, Brody—people she barely knew ... but, even so, she asked, “You have news about them?”

  “About what they face.”

  “What?” both Tonis asked in unison.

  “The obstacles in their path are more recent than the Dolbrians. Whatever the Protean on Salmagundi wanted us to find, it is sealed behind a barrier erected by the Proteans themselves.”

  Toni II turned to Toni and said, “That means that they can remove it, right?”

  She felt Toni’s grip tighten on her hand, and her voice was cold when she spoke, “Why didn’t Proteus tell me this?”

  Toni II opened her mouth, but then it sank in. Her other self had accepted Proteus’ bargain, and she hadn’t stopped to think of what it would take to make her agree to it, to allow an alien machine to burrow into her, take her apart and reassemble her, to know her more intimately than she could possibly know herself. To embrace something that, for all her life, she’d been taught was an evil. Maybe the evil.

  To face that, accept that, and discover that what had embraced her had betrayed her.

  Toni II felt the anger, and read it across her own face.

  She squeezed her hand back, a silent acknowledgment that Toni still had her.

  Mallory had been explaining the logic of why they hadn’t heard this from the Proteans, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was what he said next:

  “I need a pilot.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Cathedral

  “Before you search for something, make sure you understand what is before your eyes.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.”

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  (1865-1939)

  Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  It took General Lubikov several hours to secure his position in control of the monastery. Kugara thought the delay had more to do with a pathological thoroughness on Lubikov’s part than it did with any effective resistance. All the prisoners remained in the amphitheater, with oversized suits of powered armor playing baby-sitter over them.

  It at least gave them some time to rest.

  An hour or so into the waiting, Dörner whispered to her, “What are we going to do?”

  She sighed and said, “Get some sleep. We have no idea when will be the next time we’re going to get some rest.”

  “But aren’t you planning an escape?”

  Kugara shook her head.

  “But—”

  “Rest,” Kugara said, and the blonde xenoarchaeologist shut up.

  She didn’t blame Dörner, much. The woman was an academic and probably didn’t see any difference between their situation now and all the other crazy risks they’d taken so far. But it was different. They were held by trained military, rested, undistracted, and vastly overequipped for the job. They were in a confined space with a finite number of escape routes, also covered by their opposition. Lubikov’s men were aware of their captives’ history, and were expecting something.

  Most importantly, Lubikov showed every intention of taking them where they were planning on going anyway.

  Still, it didn’t make it easy, doing nothing.

  Nickolai sat on the ground and leaned up against one of the stone benches. His eyes were closed and occasionally he’d grumble a feline snore. She slid down to sit next to him, leaning her head against his massive chest. He grumbled again, and his arm shifted to reach around her, pulling her to him. Even half-conscious, his hug was bruisingly strong, and would have been a struggle to escape, had she wanted to.

  She ran her fingers along the fur on his chest, tracing where his stripes faded to white. It reminded her that there was a reason she was doing this. In the personal and moral vacuum she had been in since Mosasa hired her, she could have seen herself giving in to Adam’s bargain. Her independence aside, what would she have been giving up, really?

  With Nickolai, she knew what she’d lose. For all that she seethed at his self-flagellation, his angst, his superior attitude—she knew that deep down she found him admirable. For all the physical prowess engineered into him, his real strength was a commitment to what he thought was right. She had lived a long time in a world where expediency and power ruled the day; she had accepted that ethics and morals were simply obstacles to overcome. What was right began and ended with what worked.

  She met him as a fellow traveler in Mosasa’s band and grew to see him as just another pious idiot. Initially she saw it as a pose, the same sort of hypocrisy that she saw in all ostentatiously religious people, the sort who advertise their faith out of some need for social or psychological advantage, or who needed an excuse to do what they would do anyway.

  But he wasn’t like that, especially since the brunt of his theological excoriation was borne solely by himself. The self-pity was infuriating, but a mark of a sincerity that she’d never seen before, in anyone. And he wasn’t a static dogmatist either; she could see him trying to understand, trying to reconcile himself to the upended world they found themselves in. She could see him trying to figure out what was right, even when his religion failed him.

  He gave her an anchor in the midst of the chaos, one she could not let go. She knew why she wanted to fight Adam; because she knew that Nickolai would never submit, and she would not continue in a universe without him.

  Very quietly, she whispered into his chest, “Thank you.”

  When Lubikov returned, he took the four of them and the canine monk Lazarus. Three of the Goliaths followed along with five more conventionally armored soldiers, making Lubikov’s warning against any attempted escape somewhat redundant.

  They walked down a complicated set of tunnels, Lazarus leading the way. The deeper they went, the less natural the stone walls became. In places, Kugara began to discern sharp angles and surfaces too flat, tunnels too straight.

  After the first hour or so of walking deeper under the mountain, Dörner called out that she saw something. Under
the glare from the Goliath’s spotlight, she ran to one of the sections of wall too flat for nature.

  The patch of wall was covered with carvings almost too faint to see, the spotlight’s glare deepened the shadows to the point where the worn scratches in the rock were visible. The cuneiform knotwork of the Dolbrian script was unmistakable—triangles within triangles. She touched the surface and said, “This is the real thing.”

  “Can you read it?” Kugara asked.

  “Give me a moment.”

  Lubikov turned around and said, “Move it. We aren’t sightseeing here.”

  “This could be important,” Dörner called back toward him.

  “Do I need to remind you that is not your decision?”

  Dörner started to say something, but Brody patted her on the shoulder and said, “Let’s keep going.”

  They sighed and resumed marching down the tunnel. After a few minutes, Lazarus said, “That was a position marker. The numbers there refer to a complex coordinate system, angular measures of where we were in relation to the center of the planet, where the planet was in relation to Kropotkin, where Kropotkin was in relation to the center of the galaxy at the time they carved it.”

  It marked more than that.

  It marked the point where a hundred million years began to fade away. After they passed that patch of naked Dolbrian writing, the character of the tunnel began to change. The artificial flatness and angular nature of it was no longer hinted at beneath layers of rock, and even the floor evened out until the irregularities in the surface became a ribbed stairway. The walls flattened around them until the tunnel became a pentagonal prism. The carvings deepened, covering every surface now.

  Kugara had no idea that anything of the Dolbrians had survived so intact. Where they walked now seemed less than a hundred years old, much less a hundred million.

  Something covered the walls down here, a transparent coating that gave off a subtle sheen when the Goliaths’ spotlights traversed it. When Kugara touched it, it felt as smooth as glass, even over the carvings. Her fingers seemed to float a hair’s breadth over the surface.

  The deeper they walked, the more age seemed to fall from the walls, the carvings acquired color beneath their protective shell; reds and golds buried in the depths of each line cut into the rock, bleeding outward as they descended, joined by silvers and blues, until they were wrapped in a multicolored universe of looping triangular patterns.

  Dörner and Brody stared wide-eyed at the display, but the soldiers wouldn’t allow them time to gawk, pushing them forward every time they slowed. Lazarus offered no more explanations, and Lubikov kept picking up the pace.

  Kugara held no more doubts that there was something down here. Where they walked held no resemblance to a natural cavern anymore. The edges of the bottom-heavy pentagon were knife-edge sharp now, the floor flat and sloping down now at a forty-five-degree angle, making the ribs every half meter necessary to avoid tumbling forward.

  Necessary for those without armor, anyway. All the normal powered suits with them had gyroscopic stabilization aiding them, and the Goliaths, which barely fit and had to follow them down single file, had a center of gravity so low that they probably would have to make a conscious effort to trip.

  They reached the end of the corridor where the walls disappeared and the floor flattened out beyond a darkened doorway. Kugara could sense a massive chamber beyond even before Lubikov and Lazarus disappeared into the darkness. They followed, and she could hear Nickolai’s sharp intake of breath before the Goliaths walked in with their spotlights.

  When the chamber was illuminated, she felt her breath catch as well.

  Where they had entered, the ceiling was barely above the top of the Goliaths’ armor, but it sloped up, and up, and up, until it met five other massive slabs of rock a hundred meters overhead. She looked up at the underside of a massive five-sided pyramid. Each face was crowded with Dolbrian writing, not only the triangular script, but concentric circles, ellipses, dots. Thousands of circular symbols spread across the ceiling in a gigantic star map.

  Above them, the circled dots varied in size, and their color ranged from white-blue, through yellow, to orange-red. If she had to guess, the pride of place at the tip of the pyramid would go to Kropotkin, Bakunin’s star.

  The Dolbrians’ place in human history was assured, not just by the planets they terraformed, but because of star maps like this one. Just fragmentary pieces of star maps like this one spurred the golden age of human colonization during the Confederacy—shards covering at most ten light-years had been hoarded as leads to more terraformed planets, more wealth, more political power.

  The value of such things had declined with the demise of the Confederacy, as controlling actual planets meant more to internal stability than finding new ones. But still this artifact was priceless in most ways Kugara knew how to assign value to it.

  “This is what the monastery was set up to protect,” Nickolai whispered.

  Dörner walked out onto the floor of the chamber and pointed up. “I think that is Xi Virginis.” The circle she indicated was close in to the peak, and Kugara had to revise her sense of scale. The starscape above had to be several times the diameter of known human space. When she stared, she could even see some of the structure of the Milky Way in the stars distributed above her head.

  The vastness of what the Dolbrians placed here only highlighted how vast everything else was. Here was a slice of space ten times greater than anywhere humans had ventured, and she could just make out the uneven distribution that marked the boundary of a small part of a spiral arm of the Galaxy.

  She stared at the tip of the pyramid, and the small volume marked at the fringe by Xi Virginis; such a tiny area. It made Adam’s claim of godhood laughable. And it made the fate of humanity, and its bastard children like her and Nickolai, irrelevant.

  Nickolai whispered, “I now know why the monks feel close to God here.”

  “How do you do that?” she asked him.

  “Do what?”

  “I see this, and all I can think of is how insignificant everything is.”

  “We aren’t insignificant,” Nickolai said. “No one is.”

  “I just—” she found herself interrupted by the tail end of an argument between Lubikov and Lazarus.

  “Are you trying to tell me that this is it?” Lubikov snapped.

  “This is the heart of the Ancients’ presence here.” Lazarus said. “You said yourself you can trace what it is we’re protecting.”

  Dörner and Brody were looking at each other, as if they were wondering, “Did the Protean actually send us here?”

  Kugara looked up at the star map. Could it be pointing somewhere, to something they could use against Adam? If so, they were fucked. She didn’t see any of them getting off of this rock again.

  “No, Brother Lazarus,” Lubikov said. “I don’t believe these people were sent for a star map. This is why you’re here, but it’s not what you’re protecting.”

  “I assure you—”

  Lubikov raised his hand slightly, and the Goliaths moved, pointing their weapons at the monk. The other soldiers in powered armor made a point of stepping away from him. Lubikov stared at the tawny canine and said, quietly, “You are a terrible liar.”

  “I can’t—”

  “What is that?” Nickolai said, loudly enough to draw attention away from the standoff.

  Lubikov turned to face him, “What is what, Mr. Rajasthan ?”

  “Brother Lazarus?” Nickolai asked. “Why is the floor where you stand different than the floor where I stand?”

  Kugara could see nothing special about where Lazarus stood, but the way the canine turned and glared at Nickolai told her all she needed to know.

  “How different?” Lubikov asked.

  Nickolai walked up to the standoff, looking down. His alien matte-black eyes gave his face a skull-like appearance in the spotlight’s glare. “It’s very well hidden, almost a mirror of the remaining stone fl
oor. But the temperature is a fraction of a degree warmer.”

  One of the solders said, “I don’t see anything in IR.”

  Nickolai bent at Lazarus’ feet. “Your equipment is probably not sensitive enough.” He reached out with a finger, extending a hooked black claw, and drew the tip across the floor at the monk’s feet. He traced a razor-straight line in the dust. He continued, walking around, marking the floor, until Lazarus was contained within a perfect pentagon, ten meters on a side, one flat side parallel to and nearly touching the nearest wall.

  Nickolai faced that wall. It rose straight up five meters to meet the sloping pyramidal roof. Unlike the rock above them, the wall was unadorned, stretching from the doorway they had entered, to another similar pentagonal opening underneath another vertex of the giant pyramid. Kugara couldn’t see the whole pyramid, but she assumed that it was symmetrical and had a doorway in each corner.

  I guess the Dolbrians had a thing for fives.

  Nickolai took a few steps, still facing the wall, his back to everyone else. She could tell he was studying the surface, even though there didn’t seem to be any significant variation or irregularity in the blank wall.

  She glanced at Brother Lazarus, and it appeared the canine monk was holding his breath. Nickolai was onto something.

  The Goliaths swept their spotlights to cover him, causing his orange-and-black fur to stand out brilliantly against his shadow on the wall. Every muscle in his back seemed to be carved in higher relief by the stark light.

  She glanced over to Brody and Dörner and tilted her head slightly, making a point to step forward, across the line Nickolai had drawn in the floor and into the pentagon. The two scientists glanced at her, and followed suit.

  When he was centered, just inside the wall-facing side of the pentagon, Nickolai grunted slightly. The sound had a satisfied ring to it.