[Apotheosis 03] Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  Lazarus said, “Don’t—” while simultaneously Lubikov said, “Wait—”

  Then Nickolai touched the wall and the ground fell away beneath her feet.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Benediction

  “People will more readily give up their lives than give up their beliefs.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”

  —JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

  (1753-1821)

  Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Father Francis Xavier Mallory stood in a large auditorium in one of the still-intact habitats on the Wisconsin. He stood at a podium and faced an audience made largely of holo projections. It reminded him of the classes he’d taught on Occisis.

  There were a few flesh-and-blood people here, refugees and staff who hadn’t managed to evacuate, and for whatever reason had yet to leave. The remaining space was crowded by projections from every part of the fleet that remained. Even after the dire losses they had suffered, and after so many had joined the Proteans and left the system, there were enough people in the audience that, had they been real, there would have been no room to breathe.

  He faced them from his improvised altar and said, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

  About half mirrored his sign of the cross and responded, “Amen.”

  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

  Again, about half responded, “And also with you.”

  He looked at them and thought, This could be all that remains of the Church. Of the ones here ignorant of the responses, he wondered how many of them were lapsed and how many had never received before. How many weren’t even Christian?

  He didn’t think it mattered.

  “As we prepare to celebrate the mystery of Christ’s love, let us acknowledge our failures and ask the Lord for pardon and strength.”

  After a moment of reflection, he led the mostly unreal congregation in the Penitential Rite, giving pauses in the responses so those unfamiliar with the Mass could catch up, following their brethren. He led through the Gloria without benefit of even a recorded choir, and the presence of so many time-lagged voices gave the hymn a quality that was both dissonant and ethereal.

  He ignored the liturgical calendar for the readings, not because he didn’t have a Lectionary, but because the time they faced was unique. This Mass, here, transcended any particular date, saint, or feast. He read from Ezekiel and Matthew, and for the homily he spoke of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness.

  “We face the same trials as our Lord faced in the desert. Satan has taken us to that same high mountain, and has shown us all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory. And Satan has said to us, ‘All these things will I give you if you fall down and worship me.’ ”

  He spoke of the fallacy of many interpretations of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, ones that held that because of His divinity, Christ couldn’t be tempted. Those interpretations missed the point. If Christ couldn’t feel the same temptation that men did, there would be little point in relating the story in the Gospel. In fact, it was a diminishment of Christ’s love for mankind to assert that He was somehow untouched by Satan’s offer.

  God gave His only son, but Christ gave Himself. It was clear from the Gospels that there were many opportunities for Him to turn aside, to escape the fate that awaited Him. But for the sake of mankind, He accepted that fate. He was allowed that choice.

  “Our choices are what define us,” he told his congregation. “You cannot have good or evil without choice, without free will. Our Lord wishes us to be good, but the only way we can be good is if we are allowed to do evil. Should we ever abdicate that responsibility, we lose our free will, what makes us human, and we commit spiritual suicide.”

  After the Mass, he walked out into the habitat proper. A fragmented Kropotkin still shone down through the false blue sky, but the habitat itself was wrecked. Buildings had been damaged, landscaping uprooted, vehicles had been tossed about at random. It looked as if he stood in the aftermath of some great natural disaster—the temporary loss of gravity had torn apart the Wisconsin. Even if they managed to hold Adam’s advance, and the world here returned to some semblance of normalcy, Mallory doubted that the station would be revived.

  The comm on his hip beeped for his attention.

  He sighed as he answered it. For a couple of hours he had been only a priest. He didn’t want to return to his role as a revolutionary leader. Or was that counterrevolutionary?

  “Mallory,” he said. “What is it?”

  One of the Valentine women was on the other end. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. Did you switch off your comm?”

  “I was conducting a service,” Mallory said.

  “You were what?”

  “What is it?”

  “We have a communication from the surface.”

  The holo was distorted by digital artifacts, the speaker’s face periodically erased by solid blocks of color scrolling across the image. The man’s voice had lost most of its human character as the computers reconstructed his speech from the bits of data escaping through the jamming on the surface.

  “Have you been able to respond?” Mallory asked.

  “No,” Lieutenant Valentine told him. “This guy was able to exploit some weakness in the broad-spectrum jamming going on down on the surface—the broadcast is coming from the jamming satellites themselves. I doubt he even has a mechanism to receive a transmission. It’s a looped recording anyway.”

  On the holo sat a man in a uniform that looked like a slightly modified version of the fatigues sold by the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. He was somewhere around thirty years standard in age, and showed a few days’ beard growth. There was a shift as the transmission looped back to the beginning.

  “I am Colonel—bzt—arl Bartholomew, acting commander of the Eas—bzt—vision of the Proudhon Secur—bzt—peration. I am sending this m—bzt—to forces remaining in—bzt—wer not made aware of the situation—bzt—ot until the leadersh—bzt—in an attempted coup. The situation on the—bzt—is deteriorating. We are facing an imm—bzt—oss of control, which will damage any defen—bzt—abilities we have. But if we align wit—bzt—mmand of the forces defending the outer—bzt—we may be able to negotiate—bzt—a reunified force.”

  Mallory stared at the transmission and shook his head. This is what he’d been hoping for since arriving back in this system. The forces on the ground on Bakunin were the last line of defense.

  But, looking into the haggard face of Colonel Bartholomew, he couldn’t help but think, Too little, too late.

  “I have assumed the author—bzt—attempt contact and negotiate an all—bzt—behalf of the Proudhon Defense Corporation. The Wes—bzt—Division has ceased communication with us. We have been trying to—bzt—control of jamming and ATC facilities. We have—bzt—evy resistance. But we do have opera—bzt—control of Proudhon and the spacep—bzt—ssfully avoid orbital defenses we guarant—bzt—passage for any representative in—bzt—airspace.”

  “Do you think you can repeat Parvi’s gimmick?” Mallory asked.

  “Toni—the other Toni—she can. We’re trained pilots, but since she—when they—she’ll react a lot faster than Parvi could have.”

  “Good,” Mallory said, “I want to meet with this colonel.”

  Valentine turned around and looked at him. “I thought you were sending us to the mountains, to back up Parvi’s team?”

  “Only some of us,” Mallory said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Tabernacle

  “It is larger than you can imagine.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.”

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  (1809-1892)

&nb
sp; Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  When they brought them into the presence of the Dolbrian artifact, Nickolai knew that they were close to Brother Lazarus’ holy of holies. Even as the general began to argue, Nickolai could sense the tension in the monk’s posture; the defensiveness and the smell of fear. It was not the aspect of someone who had led them to a dead end.

  Lazarus still acted as if he hid something, and Nickolai looked around the Dolbrians’ work with his alien eyes, searching for something that the monk would be trying to conceal. As he looked deep into spectra beyond the visible, he saw the Ancients’ work in impossible detail, the map above their heads a frighteningly dense snapshot of the universe a hundred million years ago, highlighting the planets the Ancients had terraformed.

  So many.

  He wondered if it was possible that no one had set foot on a planet they hadn’t touched beforehand.

  The detail of the map was there and vivid in all the wavelengths he could see, which is why he turned his attention to the floor. It was a surface devoid of any interest, made of featureless stone, polished smooth.

  Whatever he looked for, it had to be accessible to the monks.

  It was under Lazarus’ feet, a large pentagon in the floor radiating at a different temperature than the surrounding stone. The temperature gradient was so slight that it could have been just natural variation—if the edges weren’t so obviously artificial.

  Even with his Protean eyes, he had to concentrate to see the seam between the pentagon and the rest of the floor. He talked to the others, but his attention was riveted by the ground at Lazarus’ feet.

  A door.

  He traced the edges in the dust, looking for the mechanism to open it. There was nothing obvious on the floor. The next place to put some sort of actuator was the wall facing the bottom of the pentagon. He stood, facing the wall, staring at it. Behind him, he heard Kugara and the scientists follow him into the pentagon.

  His shadow spread over the wall in front of him as spotlights focused on him. He blinked a few times and his eyes compensated for the variance in light reflected from the stone in front of him. Like the floor, the wall here was featureless, absent the dense detail carved in the ceiling, or even in the corridors leading to this place. Any markings should have been obvious on the plain wall, but passing aeons made it hard to detect.

  He did find it. The placing seemed logical, and explained why the monks would have been able to find it without equipment with the tolerances of his eyes; a small spot on the wall, midway between floor and ceiling, and centered along the base of the pentagon on the floor. Unlike the floor, there were no seams, no temperature gradient, making it much harder to find. All that showed it was a slight pattern of wear that almost invisibly distinguished it from the rest of the wall. A rough circle about fifty centimeters in diameter showed some smoothing from repeated touching.

  Nickolai reached out and touched the spot on the wall.

  The floor dropped out from beneath his feet. He fell backward, painfully twisting his tail underneath himself. General Lubikov still stood at floor level, but had quick enough reflexes to jump down onto the descending platform next to Brother Lazarus before they had fallen more than three meters. Two of the soldiers in the light powered armor followed, falling nearly ten meters to crash down next to Kugara and the scientists.

  Lubikov called up, “Hold your position!” at the receding pentagonal hole above them. Two of the Goliaths bent over to shine their spotlights down on them.

  Thirty meters and Lubikov turned to Brother Lazarus, who had braced himself and was the only one standing upright, “Where is this going?”

  “Where you want to go, General,” Lazarus whispered. He turned to look at Nickolai and said, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  Nickolai pushed himself upright and said, “Only what you didn’t have the heart to do.”

  “The Ancients are not to be trifled with! Only when the time is right will the Barrier fall.”

  Nickolai shook his head. “I smell your fear, Lazarus. For you, the time will never be right.”

  The others got slowly to their feet, and Lubikov’s solders made a point of backing to flank their general and cover both Lazarus and Nickolai. The platform accelerated its descent, the chamber now more than three or five hundred meters above them. The air was noticeably warmer, and carried a charged potential, as if he stood next to a massive transformer. He caught a whiff of ozone that became steadily stronger.

  The light from the Goliaths became diffuse, little more than a pair of stars above them now. He realized that the shaft they descended angled slightly, and after another hundred meters the Goliaths above weren’t able to shine their spotlights on them.

  The potential in the air began to charge his fur until every slight movement seemed to crackle. After they fell out from under the lights of the Goliaths, they were left illuminated only by the weaker flashlights from Lubikov’s men.

  And still they descended.

  Kilometers passed by before the platform slowed. Then the walls of the shaft vanished above them, and they were washed by an electric blue light.

  Kugara whispered, “Good Lord.”

  The space was vast, an order of magnitude larger than the pyramidal void far above them. The pentagonal platform slid through the ceiling, the pentagonal shaft ending in a single facet of a vast geodesic dome. Above them, Dolbrian markings covered the whole domed ceiling, close to a kilometer in diameter. And the markings themselves illuminated the huge space below, masses of tiny glowing points swarming above them in an arc of artificial sky.

  As they continued to descend, and they could see the shape of the mural across the ceiling, the form became obvious. When the platform stopped, and they were on the ground of the chamber, the dome above held a glowing image of the entire galaxy. The Milky Way hovered above them, its arms reaching across the underside of the dome, the markings so far away from them that it looked real, as if they stood on the surface of a planet hovering thousands of light-years away.

  “How can that still be glowing?” General Lubikov whispered.

  “S-some sort of bioluminescence,” Dörner said. “They engineered something that can feed off the environment, the air, the rock...”

  “For a hundred million years?” Lubikov said.

  Kugara walked up to Nickolai and placed a hand on his arm. “Remember what I said about feeling insignificant?”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.”

  Brother Lazarus walked off the platform and knelt down, bowing his head. The two soldiers followed him, flanking the monk. General Lubikov lowered his gaze from the galaxy above and said, “So, were you trying to hide another star map?”

  Nickolai walked off the platform, and took a few more steps into the chamber saying, “No, I don’t think so.”

  Unlike the chamber above them, this one was not empty. Beneath the glowing artificial stars, a black hemisphere sat in the center of the floor. Even with his Protean eyes, the smaller dome was hard to see at first. It did not appear to reflect or emit any radiation at all, and despite being three-dimensional, Nickolai’s brain kept trying to interpret the thing as a shadow.

  “What is that?” Nickolai asked.

  “That is the Barrier.”

  The Barrier ... the words echoed uncomfortably in Nickolai’s skull, the voice alien and halfway familiar. The echo was gone before he could focus on it.

  The Barrier seemed deceptively small in the gigantic space. It was only possible to overlook it at first because it was nearly half a kilometer away from them, centered under the arc of the glowing Milky Way. Even with his Protean eyes, which were far better at estimating distance than even the artificial eyes they’d replaced, it took a moment for the enormity of the distance involved to sink in.

  The hemisphere of the Barrier had to be close to two hundred meters in diameter. It could easily enclose the Dolbrian pyramid above them, and hav
e volume to spare. It rested on a flat stone floor, which, unlike the floor of the pyramid, was generously carved with lines of Dolbrian script. Dörner and Brody called to one of the soldiers to shine the light on the floor in front of them. The nebulous blue of the faux starshine was washed away by the stark white of the soldier’s flashlight. It cut shadows deep into the intricate carvings underneath a transparent protective coating. The two scientists stared at the carving with almost the same expression as Kugara wore, staring at the ceiling. Reading human expression was still a new experience for Nickolai, but he suspected that it was something like awe.

  “Can you read it?” Lubikov asked. “What does it say?”

  Dörner’s voice cracked, “I—I—damn! I studied this, but this isn’t mathematics, or stellar coordinates. There are words and symbols, I don’t know . . .” She looked up, at the plain all the way to the Barrier. “It covers the whole floor?”

  Brother Lazarus reached out and touched the surface of the floor. “It is our scripture,” he whispered. “We have studied it for nearly two hundred years, and about ten percent, maybe fifteen, we have so far translated.”

  “How could you keep this secret?” Dörner stared at him, her voice cracking. “This is the most important archaeological discovery in the entire history of—”

  Lazarus growled at her. “This place does not exist for the amusement of idle academicians!” He rose from the crouch, and his body language was so tense that both soldiers moved to train weapons on him. “Your concept of history, of time, of species—it is all nothing in the eyes of the Ancients. They left us words and artifacts millions of years beyond our understanding—”

  “Brother Lazarus,” General Lubikov interrupted. “I would like to remind you who is still in charge here.”