Context

by John Meaney

  No, no, no, no, no...

  Something clutched at Tom’s heart but then they were past the void, hurtling upwards, the ‘sprite whipping its tendrils in a blur across faces and limbs and twisting torsos of the boiling human hive. Between Tom’s legs the arachnasprite shook and whined as Thylara pushed it far past normal limits, knowing they had seconds to live if she failed.

  The shaft, the writhing people, flowed past.

  A downward glance. The blackness was spreading, yet not pursuing.

  Multitudes cried out, as the arachnasprite continued its hellish climb. The sound became a roar, a tidal pressure wave. Tom’s ears popped.

  The world grew silent.

  Burst eardrums.

  Tendrils a blur.

  Half a million grasping hands fell away.

  Whiteness...

  And they sprang upwards into a place of blazing light.

  ~ * ~

  66

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  Nova-bright, it shone around them. Thylara swerved the ‘sprite, took a new course, and they danced upwards along the glassine structure. They were inside the great blossom which was now alive with focused light.

  Five seconds to reach the apex.

  The whiteness grew on every side. It was as though the crystalline structure was no longer the energy’s source; instead, the very air seemed to be on fire, a pulsing white globe with a life of its own.

  Then they were on the clear roofs outer rim where Tom expected Thylara to slow, but if anything the ‘sprite moved faster as they tipped over, and danced down the convex outer wall until they reached the ground, and the temporary illusion of safety.

  Tom’s heart beat so fast he thought it might burst. In the bag he was still clutching, did long-dead Eemur feel fear of her own?

  Now Thylara paused, checked her lased-in her-eyes-only display, then gunned her arachnasprite into motion once more, and the grass flowed by beneath them like an emerald torrent which rushes towards the wild and massive ocean, birthplace of life, saltwater cradle of all existence, something which Tom had never seen for real.

  There was an invisible war, unseen but deadly: femtophages and pseudatomic lattices, borne in smartmists and virtual bursts, battling against each other. Attack and counter-measure formed a finely balanced conflict; with limits on evolutionary capability, to prevent wildfire leaps to unforeseen sections of morphological phase-space, the appearance of new forms which would prove as deadly to the human originators as to the intended targets.

  It was self-interest, the ancient decision to limit the way femtotech was used for violence: a way of avoiding the immolation of the species. But everyone in the know among Corduven’s forces had been afraid, since the Blight might have removed all restrictions and produced who knew what devilish creations.

  But the war was waged, and fizzled out.

  And the archaic forms of hand-to-hand conflict came to the forefront yet again.

  The arachnasprite danced across a field of blood and mud, passed wounded soldiers—who reached out, might have called to Tom had he ears to hear them—and butchered corpses. Overhead, Corduven’s flyers and the Blight’s armoured drones, many hundreds of them now, filled the air with their own form of battle.

  Down here, grey-uniformed companies of Dark Fire forces—human allies, not Absorbed, from what Tom could see—marched against the ground troops the flyers had landed. The élite forces, trained in holo-caverns to fight in the agoraphobic vastness of ground level.

  I didn‘t expect this.

  Only Corduven could have mobilized such vast numbers, and even then they must have been on instant standby. He must have been waiting personally for Tom’s signal; had instantly seen the significance of the Blight’s reaching out to Anomalies of other worlds—if that was truly the purpose of the great crystalline structure.

  But Tom had not thought the agoraphilia-conditioned forces included the Clades Tau, or any ‘sprite clans, and he wondered whether the nomad riders had made surface forays of their own, over the years. How else could Thylara function up here?

  Graser-burst, and all the tendrils along the arachnasprite’s right side gave way, and they fell.

  Both Tom and Thylara rolled clear by reflex.

  They were almost beyond the battlefield, and Thylara tugged Tom in the right direction, plodding now across unbroken heath, while the silent—to Tom—cacophony of light and death played out behind him. There was no point in looking back: if they were pursued, they were dead. Neither he nor Thylara had weapons to speak of.

  They walked, and Eemur’s Head in its bag banged against his right thigh on every other step, but Tom had a feeling that she would voice no complaint, even if she had the ability.

  And then they were scrambling down a slope, into a small dell, where Corduven had set up a command post inside a transparent armoured bubble-tent. His strategy advisers clustered around him, and one of them was lean and cheerful—even in these circumstances—the light of magical genius dancing in his eyes.

  Avernon!

  Tom went to grasp forearms in the noble fashion, but Avernon embraced him like a long-lost brother, shouting words of joyful greeting which Tom could not hear.

  Flyers passed by overhead, accelerating towards the battle.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Tom pointed to his ears. ‘I’m deaf. Does my voice sound right?’

  Avernon nodded.

  Tom explained how he had summoned Corduven’s forces, with a microtransmitter which utilized any power source it could: he assumed it had vaporized with the overload after the first message-burst.

  I didn‘t think he‘d send his entire army.

  And accompany them. Tom glanced towards the tac-display, where Corduven looked like a living skeleton himself, taut-skinned and surviving on his nerves.

  They must have interpreted the information in the same way as Tom. If the Blight was a local seed of an Anomalous form of life, restricted to Nulapeiron, and it was about to join with the Fulgor Anomaly and whatever counterparts existed on other worlds ...

  If the Blight was not already a dark god, then soon it would be.

  ‘It was Elva’s idea.’ Tom could not take the credit for the notion: she knew transmitter design better than he, for all his use of mu-space tech.

  Avernon shook his head, not knowing who Elva might be. Then he asked a question, but Tom could not understand.

  ‘We need to do the same again,’ he said, or hoped he said, to Avernon. ‘The most powerful signal you can imagine.’

  Tom reached inside his tunic, made a control gesture in front of his stallion talisman, and caught the small ovoid capsule as it slipped out of the metal when it split apart.

  I did it before.

  Spreading his hands, Avernon said something. An excuse, a reason it could not be done. Still, he accepted the capsule when Tom held it out, and split it open with one thumb to reveal the crystal inside.

  If it doesn‘t work, we‘re all lost.

  Avernon shook his head.

  But Thylara moved before Tom could think of a reply, and dragged Avernon up the dell’s slope—Tom followed—until they stood at the top with the battle zone a distant conflagration. She pointed, demonstrating why they had no choice.

  We‘re lost, along with all humanity.

  Beyond the battlefield, a white light blazed greater than the sun.

  They flew, and they prepared to die, and it was magnificent. And Tom wept when he realized what was occurring.

  It was a final, desperate move.

  His idea. If he was wrong, brave young men and women were throwing their lives away for nothing.

  Either way, for twenty flight crews, this spelled their deaths.

  No…

  Tom had not thought it possible, but the white light was growing, spreading ...

  Standing at the slope’s apex, he suddenly fell to one knee, buffeted by a great wind which had sprung up from nowhere. All around, men and women were pitching over.

  In the d
istance, thousands were engaged in hand-to-hand combat amid the blood and the mud, the churned ground a silent backdrop to desperate conflict where graser fire cut down distant combatants while others struggled close enough to inhale each other’s stinking breaths, feel the opponent’s heart beating beneath their ribs, using any weapons which came to hand: here, teeth upon the jugular, biting till bright hot blood spurted; there, the use of thumbs to wetly hook out eyes, then mercifully snapping the neck while the dying man screamed.

  But all the time, that nova-glow was growing.

  Tom knew—he had seen the confirmation in Avernon’s eyes, and Avernon was a logosophical genius whose like had not been seen in Nulapeiron for a century or more—that the blazing white light indicated more than the burning of the atmosphere, the incandescence of a vast explosion to come.

  Worse, much worse: those energies would rip through spacetime, twist apart its smallest structures, dive through the tiny extra hyperdimensions of the realspace continuum, tearing a pathway through the Calabi-Yau layers beneath reality, ripping open a channel which would stretch all the way to Fulgor, in a perverse exploitation of natural law which could breach the light-years between this world and the original Anomaly as though the universe’s vastness were a mere bagatelle, a trick designed to separate lesser beings from their dreamed-of destinations.

  We’re going to die, all of us.

  But worse, much worse, was the Fate of those who might physically survive, their souls lost forever as part of the expanded Blight: components of the Dark Fire, subsumed within a being so great its powers and purposes could never be comprehended by single biological beings, as far below awareness as bacteria within multicellular bodies.

  Elva. Do I get to see you again before we die?

  But he did not know where she was, whether Thylara’s fellow TauRiders had managed to whisk Elva to safety along the deserted tunnels within the old Collegium.

  The sky brightened.

  Flickering in his vision—thinking for a moment that his retinae were damaged—black flames whose dimensions were impossible to guess danced across that whiteness, as the Dark Fire claimed Nulapeiron’s skies for itself.

  We expect to fight that?

  Whirlwinds tore across the ground, spitting soil and people upwards into the air. Across the battleground, troops of both sides hunkered down, dug with their fingers into clay and mud, holding on for survival. Torn corpses and screaming soldiers—Tom could see their mouths distended wide, though the world remained silent and warm liquid ran from his ears—were whipped up into the maelstrom, were gone.

  It was the Day of Judgement.

  In the whiteness, there remained for now a core of greater energy, the blazing heart of the Blight’s burgeoning connection which would soon explode in a crescendo of climactic joining as two Anomalies became one, merged their energies, pulsed together into a fusion whose urgent drives and godlike powers were beyond Tom’s power to imagine.

  There...

  He could see them now: twenty tiny triangles, flying through the air, almost lost amid the glow.

  Dead, for sure.

  But Avernon was a genius, and he had networked the flyers together in a way which would heterodyne the signal that Tom had configured. On board, one flyer carried his mu-space crystal, which this time surely could not survive.

  It was the Zajinets from Ro’s Story who had given Tom the idea, with their ability to warp Calabi-Yau space in the near vicinity—the nature of the aliens’ teleportation abilities had been clear to him, if not to the people involved in those historical events—as well as travel through mu-space using technology similar to the Pilots’ own.

  With his hearing gone and time running out, he had told Avernon only the barest bones of his theory; but Avernon had understood before Tom had half begun, and waved him away to get some peace, working on his calculations while Corduven had the task of deciding which flyer squadron he would send to their deaths.

  And now the action was under way.

  Raging storms tore the landscape, ripped vegetation and bodies apart, while energies lit the skies as the clouds became incandescent and the white-upon-white glow grew ever brighter overhead, and the entire atmosphere began to shiver.

  It was indeed the Day of Judgement.

  Do you remember, Dart?

  But if Tom was right, it could become Ragnarok: it could be Armageddon.

  Can you recall what it means to be human?

  And if that entity, part of the mu-space universe itself, ever deigned to have such considerations, could It be moved to care? Would It worry about the species It formerly belonged to, any more than humans thought about the microbes from which they had once evolved?

  For there was a difference: between the Last Judgement delivered by an omnipotent deity, and the Final Battle in which two such forces opposed each other...

  Whiteness, as the atmosphere was ripped apart.

  It was the moment space split open.

  No...

  Pressure waves slammed people to the ground, but Tom clung on, fingers entwined in grace, squinting against the wind to see.

  The sky ripped apart, as a wide black ribbon tore through it from horizon to horizon, arching overhead.

  Anomaly?

  The world ended.

  A foetus on the ground, a wet helpless embryo about to be squashed from existence, Tom wept, for the millions, the billions of people who would die, for Elva whom he would never see again.

  He felt the dark, uncaring presence fill the void. He knew its malevolent drives, as though its hungers could resonate inside a human soul. Rising desire, the vast concentration of growing energies which were about to burst across space-time, to explode in an orgy of merging with its distant Anomalous counterpart—

  But there existed another power as far beyond humankind as it was possible to imagine, which existed in another universe, but whose origins were as human as those of the Anomaly itself.

  And this was the moment for It to manifest Itself.

  The air was sundered, but a new thought slammed into each person’s awareness like a divine fist: a communication beyond words which burst through every mind, exploded in the soul.

  ## YOU DARE? ##

  It was the roar of an outraged god.

  A cataclysm beyond human reckoning. A thunderous raging war beyond perception; a coruscating series of battles whose sequence and setting and very nature could never be comprehended by tiny mortals who see so little of their own universe—evolved to perceive only ten per cent of the matter which exists, only four of the dimensions—and whose capacity to imagine the fractal context on which it depends is insignificant.

  They clashed, the Dart entity and the Blight.

  They fought across the universes.

  Flinging energies which could annihilate whole worlds, wringing subtle topological changes smaller than electrons in the stuff of spacetime itself: they attacked each other on every level.

  There was no way to understand their motivations: whether the being which had once been Dart held any loyalty to Its original species, or whether It merely resented the intrusion into mu-space of the Anomalous energies which Tom’s summoning communication had allowed to bleed through into that fractal continuum, no ordinary human could ever know.

  It was a conflict between two gods.

  As they struggled for supremacy, miraculous changes in physical constants took place in a very special realm: the bridge between two continua which pulsed and expanded with fiery power, forming a universe in its own right. It became a battlefield, a chessboard, a comms link and a resonance cavity in which contesting deities duelled in ways which affected that universe’s geometry, determined its future; and if stars and worlds and sentient beings rose and fell within the duration of that link-cosmos’s existence, who was there to tell?

  For when that war, that Ragnarok, was over, the battlefield which lay between them was destroyed—a universe which existed no more—and one of those two deities was gone.r />
  And later analysis, led by Lord Avernon himself, would determine that the War Between Gods had lasted a little more than one picosecond—perhaps a millionth of a millionth of a single human heartbeat’s duration.

  Nothing of the Blight remained.

  The sky was clear, fresh and tinged with yellow. The normal cloud cover, creamy and full, was wiped away. Distant dots—terraformer spheres, floating high above—looked dark against the peaceful backdrop. Below, amid toppled trees and flattened purple grasses, wrecked flyers seemed like abstract sculptures set in place to decorate a vast but neglected parkland.