Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  He tried to sit up, but his balance was off, and moving his head caused a wave of vertigo. Dörner placed her hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t move too quickly; you’re still adjusting to the implant.”

  “Implant,” he said, slurring the words.

  He looked up at Dörner and saw a bandage peeking out from the back of her neck. He reached up again, and she tried to stop him again. He pulled his wrist out of her grip and touched a similar dressing covering the back of his own neck.

  When he touched it, he grunted as the throbbing became a spike driving through his skull. He gasped and tensed every muscle in his body while the flash of agony faded.

  She grabbed his shoulder, “Are you all right?”

  After a moment to catch his breath, he said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t do that.” Laboriously, he pushed himself up into a sitting position, trying to overcome the vertigo by force of will.

  The room was larger than the one where they had been holding him. Big enough to hold half a dozen cots. Dr. Brody, the cultural anthropologist from the Eclipse, a man as dark as Dörner was pale, sat at the end of one of the cots, watching Mallory and Dörner, his right arm in a cast.

  Mallory was thankful to see him alive. Brody had been injured when the lifeboat landed, and the last time Mallory had seen him conscious was before the Eclipse had tached into this system.

  Even so, Brody didn’t look that well. His large frame seemed to have folded in on itself, and his dark skin had taken on a sickly yellow cast. Like Dörner, the back of his head was bandaged. It was more obvious on him because he didn’t have the hair to cover it. Mallory frowned, realizing that it was little better than a field dressing, and he could see blood crusted around the edges of the hidden wound.

  What did they do to us?

  “Father Mallory,” he said, “you look like hell.”

  “Where’s Dr. Pak?” Mallory asked.

  “I presume he’s making his own visit to the Hall of Minds right now,” Brody told him. “Judging by the time between your arrival and Dr. Dörner’s, it seems to take them about three hours.”

  Mallory looked from Dörner to Brody and back again. “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  “Interrogating us,” Brody said with a weak smile. “Probably more thoroughly than we were expecting.”

  “Don’t make light of this!” Dörner snapped at him.

  Brody’s fragile smile shattered. “What else have I got?” he spoke through gritted teeth.

  “At least you weren’t conscious through it. At least you didn’t feel them—feel it—” Her voice choked off, and she turned away from both of them.

  Brody whispered, “I don’t think it makes it better.” Mallory rubbed his palms on his legs, trying to regain his equilibrium. “Is it what I think it is?” Mallory asked. “They implanted a bio- interface, and they hooked us all up to a computer—”

  “The computer,” Brody said. “I have Sharon’s description of where they took us. Unquestionably a ritual space devoted to exactly what they did to us, although I suspect their own people undergo a less abbreviated initiation.”

  “It’s not an initiation,” Dörner said. “It’s rape.”

  “I doubt it is truly consensual, even among their own people. Once a culture devotes this much energy to something, opting out is rarely an option.”

  “What are they devoting energy to?” Mallory asked.

  “The preservation of their ancestors, at its base. Their entire history downloaded and stored like so many files in a library. Though I wonder how they access that wealth of information.”

  Mallory looked at him and felt a deep unease.

  “I’m not a computer specialist,” Brody went on, “but from my history I know that even at the height of the heretical technologies, no one ever was able to extract coherent information from a static recording of someone’s mind—human or AI. There always needed to be some sort of brain hosting it.”

  Mallory didn’t know what was more disturbing, having his mind implanted in some heretical AI, or having it implanted in someone else.

  Dörner was right, they had been raped. They had been violated more thoroughly than any physical assault could have done. Their captors had stripped them down to the very soul, stealing things that were to be between only God and themselves. The entirety of their existence.

  When a pair of guards brought Dr. Leon Pak into the room, glassy-eyed and unresponsive, Mallory felt as far from God’s grace as he ever had in his life.

  Alexander Shane watched as they carried the last of the offworlders from the antechamber. He had been the youngest, and the physical part of linking to the Hall of Minds was easiest for him. The mental part, though, was the worst. He had seen it in the displays monitoring the connection; he had resisted retrieval to an unprecedented degree.

  His men left him alone in the antechamber. None had questioned what he was doing. He doubted any of these men would. He had handpicked them, and each had at least two ornate glyphs upon their brows that matched with one of the fifteen on Shane’s naked scalp. At least two ancestors downloaded in common, either in this room, or in another room like it somewhere on Salmagundi.

  Therefore, most understood his thought processes, even if they didn’t completely share them. They would have been right to question him, but none did. And all of the ones who might have questioned him probably knew that leaving him alone, unchallenged, made his decisions that much harder.

  It was a questionable decision in a long line of questionable decisions. He had chosen to stage a coup and take the Triad’s authority as his own, in part because he believed they were all in desperate danger. In part because he wanted no one else to face the responsibility for some of the things he had to do.

  Things like taking copies of unwilling, living people, and feeding them to the Hall of Minds. For over a century, the Hall had been a repository only for the dead and dying, a means to preserve their knowledge and their contributions to Salmagundi. Only a few dozen minds here had been taken while their bodies lived on, all original Founders.

  Those minds were rarely taken on by their descendants, more from practical concerns than from any taboo. Better to take in some elder who had taken on a lifetime of history and knowledge from others, someone like Shane himself who hosted the merged personas of fourteen people who had likewise merged themselves with many of their ancestors.

  The fifteenth was an exception. To serve in the Triad, a potential leader was expected to take on the additional persona of one of the Founders. It was recognized that at such a venerable time in someone’s life, matters of practicality were of less a concern. It created a layer of history in the mind, a perspective that was necessary to lead.

  It also inevitably influenced the personality of the host. Shane wondered how many of his decisions of the past few days were prompted by the presence of his distant namesake in his skull. He remembered the history of Kathy Shane, ex-captain with the Occisis Marines, better than any of the other lives that had contributed to make up what he was. She had sacrificed herself to shield the people she had charge of—not her life, but her command, her honor, everything of value to her.

  Like his distant ancestor, Shane was in a position where he had to do things that would—in the end—disqualify him from leading the people he was trying to save. Already he had engaged in a coup, and now he was about to do something that verged on blasphemy.

  If Salmagundi survived, Shane knew that he would not be granted the solace of contributing to the Hall of Minds. He would be tried, convicted, and executed, and his mind would be allowed to disappear with his body.

  He eased onto one of the tables and laid himself facedown, the bio-interface in the back of his neck pointing upward toward the medical robot.

  He closed his eyes. In some sense he was giving up everything with this act. Not just his position in Salmagundi society, but he was abandoning his self as well. However, there were warships closing on his planet, and he di
dn’t have time to extract information from the prisoners in any other way. In less than an hour, he would know their stories front to back, without opportunity of deception.

  He only hoped that somewhere, in their collective mind, there might be some hope of a solution.

  He gritted his teeth, grabbed the edges of the table, and said, “Connect.”

  Above him the robot whirred, and a cable clicked into the back of his neck. A half second later, the Hall of Minds released a torrent into Shane’s brain. A barrage of memory and personality, a parade of selves no longer self-aware, no longer conscious of unraveling into the memory of the Hall of Minds. The four identities erupted through the core of Shane’s mind like magma erupting through the cracks in a volcanic island, searing what was there, burying it, enlarging it, and irrevocably changing the landscape.—moving through a burnt-out church looking for remnants of the junta—

  —while his hands are slick with sweat as he defends his thesis on the cultural parallels between modern worship of Dolbrian artifacts and twentieth-century cargo cults—

  —and opens the letter that accepts her into the most prestigious university in the Centauri Alliance—

  —his father holds his hand as he stares in wonder at the crooked black stone that’s almost three thousand years old; he stares at the three sets of texts as his father explains how a man, six centuries ago, had used it to understand a language long thought dead—

  —and speaks his vows to God while still smelling gun-smoke and ashes—

  —while a student curses him for saying that the European culture of the SEC is as worthy of study as his own—

  —and she cries over her father’s grave—

  —slamming a fist into the display showing the rejection of his paper on Dolbrian script—

  —his heart in his throat as he hears his first confession and realizes the responsibility—

  —looking up into the sky of Bulawayo understanding he will never see firsthand—

  —the audience applauding as she concludes her speech—

  —facing the Sphinx—

  —teaching his class—

  —kissing her lover—

  —feeling his age—

  —studying his alien script—

  —Cardinal Anderson—

  —Mosasa’s invitation—

  —Crash landing—

  —PANIC—

  Dr. Pak sat on the edge of the cots staring into the middle distance. He clenched his hands into fists on top of his thighs and silently rocked back and forth. Mallory watched Dörner try to talk to him, but he remained largely unresponsive. The only signs he wasn’t completely catatonic were when he yanked his arm away from her touch, and his answer when she asked if they could do anything for him.

  His response was a flat, affectless, “No.”

  Brody sat next to him, and the slow, deliberate nature of his movements showed that Brody was having the toughest recovery from the physical effects of the bio-interface implant. “Do you have any idea what we can do for him?”

  I should, Mallory thought. He had been trained in counseling when he had chosen his vocation. A priest was supposed to provide comfort and solace. However, that had never been his strong suit. He suspected that, even though he wasn’t the one to sabotage the Eclipse, the fact he had joined Mosasa’s expedition with a falsified identity meant he was not trusted here. Even if Dörner and Brody might accept him for the moment because of their shared trials, the lie stood between Mallory and the survivors of the Eclipse.

  Mallory couldn’t ask Pak to trust him enough to allow him to help. It would be hard enough for a Jesuit university professor to provide the counseling he needed after being psychically brutalized. Given Mallory’s recent history, he had the uneasy feeling that any help from him would only intensify the trauma.

  He looked at Brody and said, “Dr. Dörner is doing the only thing we can do.” He watched her talking quietly to the damaged linguist, and he saw in her face a softness that hadn’t been there while they were on the Eclipse. Of the three here, she was probably the best choice to comfort him.

  “Why did you do it?” Brody asked.

  “Do what?” Was Brody unaware of Nickolai’s confession? Mallory had just assumed that after Mosasa had violated that sacred confidence the knowledge had spread to the rest of the crew. If it hadn’t, Mallory began to wonder if he could, in good conscience, deny his involvement.

  But it wasn’t what Brody was asking him. “Why did a priest join the Bakunin Mercenaries Union with a false identity? Why did you join Mosasa’s expedition?”

  Mallory remembered Cardinal Anderson showing the intercepted video of a planet close to Xi Virginis, of thousands of black shadows swarming and obscuring the planet, and of the voice quoting Revelation: “Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”

  After what he had just been though, Mallory had no secrets, so he told Brody. He told him how he had been recruited by Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Secretary of State of His Holiness the Pope. How he had been given the identity of Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick in order to merge seamlessly into the flow of immigrants into the anarchic planet Bakunin and avoid the attention of the Caliphate. How he was to find transportation to Xi Virginis to gather intelligence on the colonies here and what may have prompted the transmission—

  “And Xi Virginis turns out to be missing,” Brody said.

  “Yes.”

  “The biblical quote seems much too appropriate for the situation.”

  “More so because the voice is familiar.”

  “It was?”

  “The same voice was transmitted a few hours ago.” Mallory quoted the part he had overheard from the radio in the troop transport that had brought them here: “I am Adam. I am the Alpha . . .”

  “With due respect to the Vatican’s paranoia, that does not seem like the Caliphate to me.”

  “No,” Mallory said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Our host said he detected how many ships in orbit?”

  “A hundred and fifty.”

  Brody brought his fingers up to massage the bridge of his nose. “A religious conflict is the nastiest kind of war humans know how to wage.”

  “The tensions between the Church and the Caliphate are primarily political, issues of human rights and self-deter—”

  Brody held up his other hand, stopping him. Quietly, he said, “I’m not talking about the Caliphate. Or the Vatican. What was it that Mosasa said before the comm unit blew?”

  Mallory remembered, if only because it was the closest he had seen the faux human AI display something akin to panic. “ ‘If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions,’ ” Mallory said. “ ‘It’s this.’ ”

  “Why do you think he said that?”

  “A star system disappeared. I suspect it was a little disconcerting.”

  “I think he saw this ‘Adam’ in the absence of Xi Virginis,” Brody said. “And I think this ‘Adam’ is the latest in a long history of missionary warriors. Just the little bit of rhetoric he’s given us: ‘I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods.’ If that isn’t a messianic message, I don’t know what is.”

  Mallory nodded. Brody voiced his own fears; fears that he had felt ever since he had heard Adam’s transmission to Salmagundi.

  “Judging by the absence of Xi Virginis and a missing colony of possibly one and a half million people, I am not optimistic about the fate of those people who don’t choose to follow him. And then there’s that apocalyptic quote from Revelation.”

  Mallory nodded.

  “I’ve had an unfortunate thought,” Brody said after a pause.

  “More so than the ones you’ve just mentioned?”

  “You’re present here b
ecause the Vatican intercepted a message, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “A tach-comm message?”

  “Of course. A normal EM intercept would have been nearly a hundred years old.”

  Brody nodded. “I don’t know if you ever heard this—you were locked in your cabin at the time—but Bill did an astronomic survey when we tached in to orbit here. Xi Virginis isn’t shining in the sky here, which means it’s been gone for at least eight years.”

  It took a moment for the import to sink in. “By the time we got that transmission—”

  “Everything was long gone. The video was either recorded nearly a decade ago, or it was completely fabricated.”

  “It was meant to be intercepted.” Mallory struggled with the idea. “But what was the point? Why plant a message to draw attention to Xi Virginis? Why not announce himself the way he did here?”

  “Maybe the message wasn’t meant for you.”

  “Who then?”

  “Mosasa.”

  “Mosasa? Why do you think—”

  A new voice spoke, “Bait.”

  Mallory turned to look at the door, where the bald man with the tattooed scalp stood in the doorway facing them. He looked stooped now, as if he had aged a decade in the few hours since Mallory had seen him last. Dr. Dörner stood up and started to say, “What did—”

  “What did I do to Dr. Pak? The same thing I did with all of you. He will recover.”

  Dr. Dörner took a step toward the man, but two armed men in black militia uniforms stepped out to flank him. Dr. Dörner stopped in her tracks and glared at their host. Mallory saw an uncomfortable echo of her expression in the old man’s face.

  He heard Brody whisper, “No . . .”

  The old man turned to face Brody with an unpleasant turn of the lip that only very charitably could be called a smile. “Dr. Brody has an excellent grasp of our culture considering how briefly he’s been exposed to it. Down to how we honor those who contribute to our identity.” He tapped a finger to his brow, where the glyphs were tattooed.