The Clansfrau prophecy may have been murky, but it was clear enough for them to make a start.
THOUGH THEIR BODIES were bloodless and a fiery tide now lit their veins, the Fae’er had learned that immortality came with neither immunity from fatigue nor a reprieve from sleep. So with the day’s ministrations now complete and her Chakanni-khi dismissed till next dawn, Queen Fae’Elayen finally reclined on her billet in a purple robe and arched her back in a long feline stretch to unkink the knots, her thoughts her own as she kneaded pressure points in the soft flesh of her feet.
It wasn’t long before she began to drift, scenes from the spent day taking center stage in her mind, a nondescript echo of music in the wings, and soon above all, the honey-malt voice she knew so well, clear enough to have been in bed beside her, as he once had been, long ago.
Were her eyes open, she would have seen the lights in her room dim ever so slightly, a lengthening of shadows, her breath becoming faint clouds of fog in the suddenly chilled air. But she was too tired to notice these changes or the hairs prickling on her neck as tears welled in her eyes. Such was the effect of a Dae’mon’s presence on a corporeal being, driving a surge of adrenals at the same time as drawing off that surplus energy and placing the body under imperceptible duress. The mind may not have registered the milking, but the body never lied.
But so familiar was she with his companionship, so seduced by his kindness, she did not think of him as a threat. In fact, she counted Grand Ephir Bøsexiéède as one of her oldest allies, a voice of certainty against confusion, a candle in the dark, and a thrill to be around. He had been so before being voted Grand and before even being promoted to Ephir, back before politics split the Fae’er into two camps.
“From all accounts, you moved the cause forward today.”
Bøsexiéède was flattering. Few were these days she reminded herself. She replied, dreamily, her eyes still closed. “Bösexiéède, thank you for coming. Surely you give me credit where it is due one of my Braces.”
“Maybe so, wise queen. But who is it that tutored handsome Aragenti?”
She chuckled at his name, as the shade’s fingers pressed imperceptibly into the receptors of her mind that serve as both axon and dendrite, embedding opinion as memory into the very cells of her body. “I did. And yes he is handsome, not that you need be jealous, Bø.”
“Your Majesty’s heart is sufficient for all your people, and your Affairs are your own. He chose his trigger words with care. Tell me, by what other name did we once know the Builders?”
“The Self Existing Ones.”
“Yes, how well you remember. And why were they called that?”
“You tease me, Bø.” She turned in her bed, her pillow inviting. “Unlike us mere mortals, they require no higher power to sustain them. They live by the golden rule.”
“Whoever has the gold makes the rules!”
An ancient joke they had shared. She chuckled at it now, the familiarity pleasing her.
“Yet you are no longer mortal, sweet Elayen. And surely more than enough gold fills your regal veins for you to make the rules. You are more like the Builders than you know. What do the Builders most need to see in you, to see that their children have become as one of them, worthy to raise up at last?”
Too many thoughts! All she craved was sleep. “I don’t know this riddle, Bø. You tell me.” The music was louder now, lulling her away.
“I need not tell you what you already know to be true. If you will be raised as a Builder, by whose rules must you live?”
A flicker of interest on the precipice of sleep. “By theirs. Obedience is one of the Virtues.”
“And yet to be self-existing, whose rules do you follow?”
“My own?” The thought was not new. Or was it? As it took root it seemed so obvious. As though she had always known it.
“There! That is the great secret. The Builders reward strength. Did not our first king walk so? Shall not our last queen do likewise? As in the Beginning, so in the End.”
“Careful now, Bøsexiéède. This brand of treason drove the first wedge. I cannot—”
“My queen, you must. You are the only one who can. Why were you chosen by the Nabiyã Siancay to govern at this very time? To be the Conclave’s puppet or to be the only one with courage enough to save us all?”
“Even if I agreed with you—and I don’t say that I do, not entirely—you would have me turn against our primary philosophy handed to us by the Builders themselves, and align instead to the very cause that had you and your party cast out from our nations?”
“If it be right, yes. My queen—Elayen—is it not good policy to do what’s right, especially when it’s unpopular to do so? Is not this when our character is tested most? When sheep become shepherds?”
Her eyes were heavy. The words seemed slow and dreamy to her ears.
“This is not about sides or philosophies. This is about survival. If Earth Prime fails this final time, you know the consequence for all worlds that cling to this rock. Why do you think there is a prophecy for these times? Who do you think it speaks of?”
“The children of prophecy,” she yawned. “Three from above, two from below. We think that we’ve found them, you know. The three.”
“No, you have only to look in the mirror. Are you not ruling monarch? It’s you, Elayen. You are the highborn. You are above all. You are one of the three! It has always been you.”
“But the others. Three came to us from above.”
“One will not pass the tests. There are only two. Only two. And you.”
Could it be?
Bøsexiéède had a way of making the prophecies so much clearer than did the seerwitches. Others eschewed the Dae’mon. But they were brethren once, fellow Fae’er. Sometimes she caught herself wondering if the best part of their race had been lost with the rift.
No, they had been friends! He would not deceive her. Not once in all these years of their private exchanges had he deviated one jot from being the same Bøsexiéède she had always known.
She turned the idea over. The more she pondered it, the more she wondered. Hadn’t the Nabiyã Siancay called her to the throne for these exact times? Was it for this purpose?
“I could unite our own people after all these years. And by so doing, we could save all the people of Earth, in all its Ages.”
“Yes. And finally, all will ascend. I believe this is your destiny, your purpose. But take heed: your own people are not all ready to embrace such change. We shall walk softly. At first.”
Sleep had almost claimed her again, the ideas burrowing deep into her hippocampus where they would be remembered as facts, and into her amygdala where they would find conviction. Bøsexiéède knew all too well that people decided with emotion, but justified with logic. To turn a person fully to a cause, conversion was needed on both pressure points.
“Who can I trust?” Fae’Elayen asked dully, the sounds of each syllable glancing off the dreamscape that tumbled toward her, pulling her away.
“They will seek you out. From all the dimensions they will come.”
Colors, music and conversations were mingling together. The Queen’s last mumbled words of the evening would have been imperceptible were the Dae’mon not inside her head. “How will I know them?”
“I will whisper truth when you need it. If you allow me to serve.”
A smile spread across Queen Fae’Elayen’s lips. Grand Ephir Bøsexiéède was a friend indeed. He was welcome to serve. It would be their secret.
AS THE FAE’ER QUEEN drifted into slumber, the shade Bøsexiéède was tempted to sever her motor skills and wrap her higher functions in a cocoon he could wedge into a corner of her mind, while he moved in to possess her body.
Disconnected from external stimuli and the surge of adrenals, she may dream forever, but even if she awoke, she’d be a cripple in her own skin. Every day there would be a little less of her and a little more of him, until she would unravel to a simpering madness bereft of even
her own voice. But tempting as the prospect was, this was not his mission here.
Not yet.
It took some restraint to withdraw his nether-fingers from probing her lithe body and active mind. This woman was so alive, so vital! As she had been when they were friends, before their people had split into factions and he had led the rebels away.
How delicious that the philosophy that had caused the Dae’mon to be expelled by the Fae’er in the beginning would now be the very cause championed in secret by their own Queen!
He stroked her bare arm as one would a pet, the hairs lifting on small mounds as his phantom’s touch passed through flesh and bone. So much easier to move in by degrees than to possess this one by force. Especially when she was so complicit.
No, he would visit this one again when it pleased him; she had given her consent. They would continue their chats, most cordial and helpful. And by a slow but steady turning of the screw, he, Grand Ephir Bøsexiéède, would bring this world and all others to its knees.
His master would reward him well.
Worlds without end.
INTO THE GRID
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY
FEBRUARY 16, 2006
GENERAL ARI KRIEGMACHER had been stationed in Fairbanks at HAARP when his Adjutant handed him a satellite call from a blocked number. It was a proposition for an interview with a private organization, such as came from the private sector every few months. Usually his aides intercepted these before they reached him. But this one got through the net, and he was required to report it.
To his surprise, his superiors already knew of it, and he found the meeting had been cleared all the way through the Pentagon, suddenly more an order from the brass than a request from a post-retirement suitor. Two days later he was landing in a private airfield outside Mannheim, Germany, and was ferried around normal Customs procedures in a nondescript Mercedes sedan that drove south then up a winding forest road around the back of Heidelberg to alight at the Königstuhl—the King’s Chair—home of the Max Planck Institut für Astronomie.
Instead of finding German students or scientists in plaid jackets and white coats in the hilltop campus, he was welcomed by a frosty blonde woman who carried a tired air of indifference for both his rank and the long journey he had undertaken at short notice. Not even when he called her ‘Blondie’ did she take the bait and talk to him.
She escorted him into a large darkened room with drawn shutters over the windows, where a video projector carved a narrow beam through air laden with blue curls of smoke.
Just out of sight behind the light he could make out a row of a dozen or so men and women waiting for him to be seated on the single metal stool in the center of the room. He lifted a yellow manila folder of documents from the stool, and sat holding it in his lap. In the meeting that followed, he never once saw anyone’s face except the blonde’s.
“Welcome, General,” said one man in a crisp Oxford accent that almost covered his Saudi origin. “This meeting never happened and you were never here. You have been selected from your peers for a special detail. Certain facts will be presented. They will be outside your experience but are to be taken at face value. They are not open to debate. In the end you will be invited to accept, whereupon we will require an answer. Do you understand and agree?”
He had agreed. Blondie appeared at his side with a computer tablet, and he imprinted his thumbprint. The screen pulsed blue, and his thumb tingled sharply.
A woman’s voice next, the hawkish clip of old Boston breeding unmistakable. “Your nation provides funding to you. We provide funding to your nation. We are the government behind governments. The Elite. You have heard of us?”
Of course he had. Every good soldier understood the chain of command, but leaders like him dug deeper to understand the power behind the throne. In doing so he had learned of the banks and the bloodlines. He told them so.
A new voice now, old and shrill, maybe Austrian. “Our world is dying, General, and it’s more than ‘an inconvenient truth’. The problem is not ozone or fossil fuels or the disappearance of bees. It’s to do with a region of space our solar system is about to fly through.”
The projector beam flared with color and a short video played out on a whiteboard behind him. He swiveled to see a computer animation of the Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun in circular arcs, which pulled back until all were shown inside a blue bubble moving along a red dotted line within a spiraling arm of the Milky Way. Ahead of the oval was a hazy arc of orange and yellow stars, this one perpendicular to the dotted line, like a mill saw cutting into a plank of wood.
The Austrian continued: “Consider our solar system as a large bus and our galaxy as the autobahn we travel around. Within three years we will intersect another autobahn, a dwarf galaxy that our Milky Way is consuming. This is called the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy15. It is dense with suns and planets of its own, moving in Helmi streams at right angles across our path. You must understand that this is not an intersection with any traffic lights or off-ramps. Do you understand the implication?”
Staring wordlessly, Kriegmacher saw it immediately. “If this is correct then the risk of collision, not to mention the tidal forces affecting our orbit . . . How many centuries until this happens?”
A number of heads bobbed at each other in the gloom, approving of his mental dexterity. They had selected well.
Boston answered: “Centuries? No, not even decades! We have less than three years until we hit the debris field. Our solar system already entered the outskirts several years ago. We have since seen a rise in sunspots and solar flares, plus new torque in the dark matter lattice we glide upon. We may not visibly observe our planet twist and groan as a result of these forces, but we do see the side effects.” The woman leaned forward through the dark, the tip of her nose and glass lenses catching the blue light of the projector while the rest of her remained in shadow. Colorless lips affected a cruel smile. “It will be biblical.”
The Austrian coughed for attention. “Not even Cecil B. DeMille himself could have directed the grandeur of this solar epic. Our planet’s core is convulsing. We’re about to see activity at the upper end of the Richter scale, creating tsunamis that will claim islands and coastal cities, while volcanoes fill the skies with corrosive clouds. God forbid any nuclear plants collapse and give us another Chernobyl. Above us we’ll see new asteroids and meteors not charted before, all extra-solar, in fact all extra-galactic material, flying sideways across Earth’s path through space. It’ll be like one giant cosmic game of Frogger.”
Kriegmacher shifted in his seat, a look of wry incredulity across his face. “It’s a story you could sell to Hollywood,” he said dryly.
Oxford joined: “Yes General, we’ve fed film producers a steady diet of disaster scenarios that has pushed discussion away from any serious forums and into film blogs where it will simply be lost in the noise. We can’t afford a panic so soon. Because unlike filmed entertainment, General, we don’t have all the answers just yet, and can’t simply walk out for popcorn. Even if our technology allowed a secret cache of spaceships equipped with biospheres and adequate fuel to take survivors away, where do you fly to when every star between Rigel and Polaris is about to be hammered? We can’t outrun this in any conventional direction, even if we had the engines to try.”
Kriegmacher asked what any of this had to do with him. It was then that they told him of Project Sidestep.
A thickly accented Belgian voice rang out in the darkness, female, as the projection changed to show two concentric circles, slightly offset. “General, you may be aware of the publicity surrounding the world’s so-called ‘black hole laboratories’: the Fermilab Tevatron16 in Chicago and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider17 under the Franco-Swiss border. To make an unpublished and complex discovery very, very short: in digging below molecules we found atoms, under atoms we found gluons and quarks, and below them all we found photons and bosons—light and ‘interpreters’ of the light.
“It turns out that when you go small enough, the matter we’re all made from is the equivalent of light particles—photons—coded to take physical form as solids, gas or liquid. It’s the boson that interprets, or codes, how the light should manifest as gas, liguid or solid, and with what properties. A kind of photonic DNA, if you will.”
Kriegmacher snorted in amusement. “So when my pappy used to call me ‘Sunshine’, he had it right.”
“More or less,” said Belgium. “Now stay with me here. When you pass light through a prism, it breaks into a rainbow of colors we can see in the visible spectrum, plus others we don’t see that are beyond our vision. Each color exists at a separate frequency, all riding the same beam of light. So if solid matter is actually made of light, what do you think you’d find if you could project reality through a prism and split it out to its different frequencies?”
The General had read enough science journals to know something about M-theory. “The current thinking is you might find parallel dimensions, an infinite number of copies of the universe . . . Wait, you’re not telling me—”
Boston interrupted: “All in good time, General. There’s another concept we want you to grasp first. We are at the early stages of being able to program the bosons that instruct photons how to function and which frequency to project. In our early experiments we found that when two photons are entangled, one will take the other’s characteristics. Like a carbon copy. Once joined through this process of entanglement18, even when we separate and place them miles apart, whatever we do to the master photon also happens to its copy. Like remote control but without any conventional form of connection, physical, wireless or otherwise. We discovered that waves of dark matter provide that link. Dark matter forms the majority of the universe, normally invisible to us, and it functions like a nervous system that connects everything, everywhere, at the same time. In fact, tapped into the right way, the same object can exist in all places at the same time.”
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