by Dan Simmons
Morpurgo looked at his oldest son with pride so fierce it bordered on pain. There were only so many torchship-rated personnel he could approach about this mission, and his son had been the first to volunteer. If nothing else, the Morpurgo family’s enthusiasm might have allayed some Core suspicions.
“My fellow citizens,” Gladstone was saying, “this is my final broadcast to you as your Chief Executive Officer.
“As you know, the terrible war which has already devastated three of our worlds and is about to fall upon a fourth, has been reported as an invasion by the Ouster Swarms.
“This is a lie.”
The comm bands flared with interference and went dead. “Go to fatline,” said General Morpurgo.
“One minute three seconds to translation point,” intoned his son.
Gladstone’s voice returned, filtered and slightly blurred by fatline encrypting and decoding. “ … to realize that our ancestors … and we ourselves … had made a Faustian bargain with a power not concerned with the fate of humankind.
“The Core is behind the current invasion.
“The Core is responsible for our long, comfortable dark age of the soul.
“The Core is responsible for the ongoing attempt to destroy humanity, to remove us from the universe and replace us with a god-machine of their own devising.”
Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo never lifted his eyes from the circle of instruments. “Thirty-eight seconds to translation point.”
Morpurgo nodded. The other two crewmen on the C3 bridge showed faces sheened with sweat. The General realized that his own face was wet.
“… have proven that the Core resides … has always resided … in the dark places between farcaster portals. They believe themselves to be our masters. As long as the Web exists, as long as our beloved Hegemony is joined by farcaster, they will be our masters.”
Morpurgo glanced at his own mission chronometer. Twenty-eight seconds. The translation to Hyperion system would be—to human senses—instantaneous. Morpurgo was certain that the Core death-wand device was somehow keyed to detonate as soon as they entered Hyperion space. The shock wave of death would reach the planet Hyperion in less than two seconds, would engulf even the most distant elements of the Ouster Swarm before ten more minutes had passed.
“Thus,” said Meina Gladstone, her voice betraying emotion for the first time, “as Chief Executive Officer of the Senate of the Hegemony of Man, I have authorized elements of FORCE:space to destroy all singularity containment spheres and farcaster devices known to be in existence.
“This destruction … this cauterizing … will commence in ten seconds.
“God save the Hegemony.
“God forgive us all.”
Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo said coolly, “Five seconds to translation, Father.”
Morpurgo looked across the bridge and locked eyes with his son. Projections behind the young man showed the portal growing, growing, surrounding.
“I love you,” said the General.
Two hundred and sixty-three singularity containment spheres connecting more than seventy-two million farcaster portals were destroyed within two point six seconds of one another. FORCE fleet units, deployed by Morpurgo under Executive Order and reacting to orders unsealed less than three minutes before, reacted promptly and professionally, destroying the fragile farcaster spheres by missile, lance, and plasma explosive.
Three seconds later, with the clouds of debris still expanding, the hundreds of FORCE spacecraft found themselves stranded, separated from each other and any other system by weeks or months via Hawking drive, and years of time-debt.
Thousands of people were caught in farcaster transit. Many died instantly, dismembered or torn in half. Many more suffered amputated limbs as the portals collapsed behind them or before them. Some simply disappeared.
This was the fate of the HS Stephen Hawking—precisely as planned—as both entrance and exit portals were expertly destroyed in the nanosecond of the ship’s translation. No part of the torchship survived in real space. Later tests showed conclusively that the so-called deathwand device was detonated in whatever passed for time and space in the strange Core geographies between the portals.
The effect was never known.
The effect on the rest of the Web and its citizens was immediately obvious.
After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere—including the All Thing and all comm and access bands—simply ceased to be. Hundreds of thousands of citizens went insane at that moment—shocked into catatonia by the disappearance of senses which had become more important to them than sight or hearing.
More hundreds of thousands of datumplane operators, including many of the so-called cyberpukes and system cowboys, were lost, their analog personas caught in the crash of the datasphere or their brains burned out by neural-shunt overload or an effect later known as zero-zero feedback.
Millions of people died when their chosen habitats, accessible only by farcaster, became isolated deathtraps.
The Bishop of the Church of the Final Atonement—the leader of the Shrike Cult—had carefully arranged to sit out the Final Days in some comfort in a hollowed-out mountain, lavishly stocked, deep in the Raven Range of the north reaches of Nevermore. Redundant farcasters were the only route in or out. The Bishop perished with several thousand of his acolytes, exorcists, lectors, and ostiaries clawing to get into the Inner Sanctum to share the last of the Holy One’s air.
Millionaire publisher Tyrena Wingreen-Feif, ninety-seven standard years old and on the scene for three-hundred-plus years thanks to the miracle of Poulsen treatments and cryogenics, made the mistake of spending that fateful day in her farcaster-access-only office on the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section of Tau Ceti Center’s City Five. After fifteen hours of refusing to believe that farcaster service would not be renewed shortly, Tyrena gave in to comm call entreaties from her employees and dropped her containment field walls so that she could be picked up by EMV.
Tyrena had not listened to instructions carefully enough. The explosive decompression blew her off the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor like a cork out of an overshaken champagne bottle. Employees and rescue squad members in the waiting EMV swore that the old lady cursed a blue streak for the entire four-minute fall.
On most worlds, chaos had earned a new definition.
The majority of the Web’s economy disappeared with the local data-spheres and the Web megasphere. Trillions of hard-earned and ill-gotten marks ceased to be. Universal cards quit functioning. The machinery of daily life coughed, wheezed, and shut down. For weeks or months or years, depending upon the world, it would be impossible to pay for groceries, charge a ride on public transit, settle the simplest debt, or receive services without access to black market coins and bills.
But the webwide depression which had hit like a tsunami was a minor detail, reserved for later pondering. For most families, the effect was immediate and intensely personal.
Father or mother had ’cast off to work as usual, say from Deneb Vier to Renaissance V, and instead of arriving home an hour late this evening, would be delayed eleven years—if he or she could find immediate transit on one of the few Hawking drive spinships still traveling the hard way between the worlds.
Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone’s speech in their fashionable multiworld residence looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing.
Children a few minutes away at school or camp or play or the sitter’s would be grown before they were reunited with parents.
The Grand Concourse, already slightly truncated by the winds of war, found itself blown to oblivion, its endless belt of beautiful shops and prestige restaurants sliced into tawdry sections never to be reunited.
The River
Tethys ceased to flow as the giant portals went opaque and died. Water spilled out, dried up, and left fish to rot under two hundred suns.
There were riots. Lusus tore itself apart like a wolf chewing at its own entrails. New Mecca went into spasms of martyrdom. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna celebrated deliverance from the Ouster hordes and then hanged several thousand former Hegemony bureaucrats.
Maui-Covenant also rioted, but in celebration, the hundreds of thousands of descendents of the First Families riding the motile isles to displace the offworlders who had taken over so much of the world. Later, the millions of shocked and displaced vacation-home owners were put to work dismantling the thousands of oil derricks and tourist centers which had spotted the Equatorial Archipelago like pox.
On Renaissance Vector there was a brief spurt of violence followed by efficient social restructuring and a serious effort to feed an urban world without farms.
On Nordholm, the cities emptied as people returned to the coasts and the cold sea and their ancestral fishing boats.
On Parvati there was confusion and civil war.
On Sol Draconi Septem there was jubilation and revolution followed by a new strand of retrovirus plague.
On Fuji there was philosophical resignation followed by an immediate construction of orbital shipyards to create a fleet of Hawking drive spinships.
On Asquith there was finger-pointing followed by the victory of the Socialist Labor Workers’ Party in the World Parliament.
On Pacem there was prayer. The new Pope, His Holiness Teilhard I, called a great council into session—Vatican XXXIX—announced a new era in the life of the Church, and empowered the council to prepare missionaries for long voyages. Many missionaries. For many voyages. Pope Teilhard announced that these missionaries would not be proselytizers, but searchers. The Church, like so many species grown used to living on the edge of extinction, adapted and endured.
On Tempe there were riots and death and the rise of demagogues.
On Mars the Olympus Command stayed in touch with its farflung forces for a while via fatline. It was Olympus which confirmed that the “Ouster invasion waves” everywhere but Hyperion system had simply limped to a halt. Intercepted Core ships were empty and unprogrammed. The invasion was over.
On Metaxas there were riots and reprisals.
On Qom-Riyadh a self-appointed fundamentalist Shiite ayatollah rode out of the desert, called a hundred thousand followers to him, and wiped out the Suni Home Rule government within hours. The new revolutionary government returned power to the mullahs and set back the clock two thousand years. The people rioted with joy.
On Armaghast, a frontier world, things went on pretty much as they always had except for a dearth of tourists, new archaeologists, and other imported luxuries. Armaghast was a labyrinthine world. The labyrinth there stayed empty.
On Hebron there was panic in the offworld center of New Jerusalem, but the Zionist elders soon restored order to the city and world. Plans were made. Rare offworld necessities were rationed and shared. The desert was reclaimed. Farms were extended. Trees were planted. The people complained to each other, thanked God for deliverance, argued with God about the discomfort of that same deliverance, and went about their business.
On God’s Grove entire continents still burned, and a pall of smoke filled the sky. Soon after the last of the “Swarm” had passed, scores of treeships rose through the clouds, climbing slowly on fusion thrusters while shielded by erg-generated containment fields. Once beyond the gravity well, most of these treeships turned outward in a myriad of directions along the galactic plane of the ecliptic and began the long spin-up to quantum leap. Fatline squirts leaped from treeship to distant, waiting Swarms. The reseeding had begun.
On Tau Ceti Center, seat of power and wealth and business and government, the hungry survivors left the dangerous spires and useless cities and helpless orbiting habitats and went in search of someone to blame. Someone to punish.
They did not have far to look.
General Van Zeidt had been in Government House when the portals failed and now he commanded the two hundred Marines and sixty-eight security people left to guard the complex. Former CEO Meina Gladstone still commanded the six Praetorians Kolchev had left her when he and the other ranking senators had departed on the first and last FORCE evacuation dropship to get through. Somewhere the mob had acquired anti-space missiles and lances, and none of the other three thousand Government House employees and refugees would be going anywhere until the siege was lifted or the shields failed.
Gladstone stood at the forward observation post and watched the carnage. The mob had destroyed most of Deer Park and the formal gardens before the last lines of interdiction and containment fields had stopped them. There were at least three million frenzied people pressed against those barriers now, and the mob grew larger every minute.
“Can you drop the fields back fifty meters and restore them before the mob covers the ground?” Gladstone asked the General. Smoke filled the sky from the cities burning to the west. Thousands of men and women had been smashed against the blur of containment field by the throngs behind them until the lower two meters of the shimmering wall looked as if it had been painted with strawberry jam. Tens of thousands more pressed closer to that inner shield despite the agony of nerve and bone the interdiction field was causing them.
“We can do that, M. Executive,” said Van Zeidt. “But why?”
“I’m going out to talk to them.” Gladstone sounded very tired.
The Marine looked at her, sure that she was making some bad joke. “M. Executive, in a month they will be willing to listen to you … or any of us … on radio or HTV. In a year, maybe two, after order’s restored and rationing’s successful, they might be ready to forgive. But it will be a generation before they really understand what you did … that you saved them … saved us all.”
“I want to talk to them,” said Meina Gladstone. “I have something to give to them.”
Van Zeidt shook his head and looked at the circle of FORCE officers who had been staring out at the mob through slits in the bunker and who now were staring at Gladstone with equal disbelief and horror.
“I’d have to check with CEO Kolchev,” said General Van Zeidt.
“No,” Meina Gladstone said tiredly. “He rules an empire which no longer exists. I still rule the world I destroyed.” She nodded toward her Praetorians and they produced deathwands from their orange-and-black-striped tunics.
None of the FORCE officers moved. General Van Zeidt said, “Meina, the next evacuation ship will make it.”
Gladstone nodded as if distracted. “The inner garden, I should think. The mob will be at a loss for several moments. The withdrawal of the outer fields will throw them off balance.” She looked around as if she might be forgetting something and then extended her hand to Van Zeidt. “Goodbye, Mark. Thank you. Please take care of my people.”
Van Zeidt shook her hand and watched as the woman adjusted her scarf, absently touched a bracelet comlog as if for luck, and went out of the bunker with four of her Praetorians. The small group crossed the trampled gardens and walked slowly toward the containment fields. The mob beyond seemed to react like a single, mindless organism, pressing through the violet interdiction field and screaming with the voice of some demented thing.
Gladstone turned, raised one hand as if to wave, and gestured her Praetorians back. The four guards hurried across the matted grass.
“Do it,” said the oldest of the remaining Praetorians. He pointed to the containment field control remote.
“Fuck you,” General Van Zeidt said clearly. No one would go near that remote while he lived.
Van Zeidt had forgotten that Gladstone still had access to codes and tactical tightbeam links. He saw her raise her comlog, but he reacted too slowly. Lights on the remote blinked red and then green, the outer fields winked out and then re-formed fifty meters closer in, and for a second, Meina Gladstone stood alone with nothing between her and the mob of
millions except a few meters of grass and countless corpses suddenly surrendered to gravity by the retreating shield walls.
Gladstone raised both arms as if embracing the mob. Silence and lack of motion extended for three eternal seconds, and then the mob roared with the voice of a single great beast, and thousands surged forward with sticks and rocks and knives and broken bottles.
For a moment it seemed to Van Zeidt that Gladstone stood like an impervious rock against that tidal wave of rabble; he could see her dark suit and bright scarf, see her standing upright, her arms still raised, but then more hundreds surged in, the crowd closed, and the CEO was lost.
The Praetorians lowered their weapons and were put under immediate arrest by Marine sentries.
“Opaque the containment fields,” ordered Van Zeidt. “Tell the drop-ships to land in the inner garden at five-minute intervals. Hurry!”
The General turned away.
“Good Lord,” said Theo Lane as the fragmented reports kept coming in over the fatline. There were so many millisecond squirts being sent that the computer could do little to separate them. The result was a mélange of madness.
“Play back the destruction of the singularity containment sphere,” said the Consul.
“Yes, sir,” said the ship and interrupted its fatline messages for a replay of the sudden burst of white, followed by a brief blossoming of debris and sudden collapse as the singularity swallowed itself and everything within a six-thousand-klick radius. Instruments showed the effect of gravity tides: easily adjusted for at this distance but playing havoc with the Hegemony and Ouster ships still locked in battle closer to Hyperion.
“All right,” said the Consul, and the rush of fatline reports resumed.