Gods and The City

by Steve Statham

  Fear mingled with a strange giddiness inside him.

  I could go anywhere. I could fly to the center of the galaxy itself and be back in time for dinner. Another galaxy even...

  This method of travel was a by-passing, a stepping around of all the normal constraints the universe imposed on biological life.

  The thought transfixed him. Before now, he'd never truly grasped the scope of this power, and so he'd never followed the implications of the ability to travel through Divine Space to the logical conclusion.

  Anywhere.

  Why haven't we?

  Divine Space had been used as an escape route to a new home after the fall of Earth and the elevation of the gods. And the seven defenders of mankind used it to move throughout their sphere of influence. Mik had even briefly traveled through it once on the Mercury Eclipse, without really understanding the nature of the environment through which he passed. So far as he knew, no human had ever been as plugged into a sentry ship's systems as he was now. And no one could truly comprehend the nature of Divine Space using only human senses, he realized.

  The gods kept this knowledge from us. A few people were allowed to travel this way, but we were locked inside ships piloted by AIs and gods, blind to the true nature of what was just outside the hull.

  An irritation at how the gods had concealed this knowledge swept through him, but he filed it away for later consideration. For now, the fixer in him, the technician who was always searching for problems to correct, examined the alternate-space technological reality of Divine Space from several angles.

  He knew that at the beginning of time, the expansion of the universe had been almost instantaneous. Had the gods tapped into some remnant of the forces that caused the newly-born universe to fill the heavens?

  It seemed improbable.

  No, he liked the idea of Divine Space as a separate universe through which the gods had forced open passageways. The pieces fit together more elegantly....

  An alert flared to life in his sensor array.

  The ship was nearing the first of the designated coordinates Tower had given him for his search for Maelstrom.

  He commanded the ship to drop out of Divine Space. There was a moment when his perceptions passed through a dead zone as the ship reoriented the sensors. And then the familiar texture of his universe reasserted itself.

  Funny how I feel home again, even though I'm gods-know how many light years from The City.

  He had exited the roiling energies of Divine Space, but the "normal" space around him was anything but calm. The ship's sensors reflected unseen energies unleashed by stars in close proximity to one another.

  The ship was drifting in the midst of a globular cluster. Mik knew where he was in relation to home, but sat for a moment in sheer awe at the spectacle. From inside the dome of The City, this bunched grouping of stars appeared as a faint mist in the night sky, one that was difficult to focus on if gazed at directly.

  But not here. The blackness of the void was punctured by individual flares of starlight in seemingly every color of the spectrum.

  Mik ordered the ship to begin mapping the surrounding starfield. He disengaged from the command bridge and made his way back to the central habitat. In here, the ship could display a three-dimensional reconstruction of the star cluster out to a distance of fifty light years, and he could manipulate the size and positioning to suit his desired perspective. Many of these stars were less than a single light year from one another. Local space was almost alive with energy.

  As the ship's preliminary survey came together the stars winked to life around him. Nearly every type of star ever cataloged surrounded him—red dwarfs and swollen orange giants, main sequence yellow suns, even flickering neutron stars. Some of the larger planets circling these stars resolved as tiny pinpoints of light. The ship's position was marked by a small green arrow just inside the boundaries of the fog of stars.

  Mik walked through the shimmering balls of gas that hung in the air around him. He compressed the stellar cluster display down into a dense ball, almost small enough to hold in his hands. Then he slowly expanded the simulation until he could stride through the stars as through a forest of burning globes.

  Tower had loaded the ship's systems with guidelines for spotting and identifying energy patterns that might indicate the presence of Maelstrom. As the data flowed in, Mik overlaid the holo images of energy gradients among the starfields on display. He sucked in his breath as it came together.

  Maelstrom indeed.

  Mik was no longer viewing just solitary globes floating in drifting orbits around him. Representations of other forces now churned in the central habitat. Turbulent stellar winds collided in the spaces between the stars. Hard radiation emissions portrayed in exotic colors warmed the ship's bulkheads. Lines of magnetic and gravitational forces coiled like the tentacles of great beasts.

  So big. How can... how can any man....

  Oh no. Not now.

  He waved away the star field display and slumped against the bulkhead wall, sliding down slowly until he sat on the floor. He put his face in his suddenly trembling hands and took deep breaths. He blocked out the overload of information the ship constantly fed him, tried to block the undeniable reality of being such a small bit of flotsam adrift in the immensity of the galaxy.

  He'd done what was required of him, pretending that a human mind could stroll through the vastness of the cosmos and analytically break it down into understandable pieces, the same way he would repair a servo or pump beneath The City. But seeing it now from this perspective, being immersed in the true power of creation, having all the inputs force-fed to him constantly, broke down the barriers the man had constructed that had allowed him to pilot the unnamed ship.

  The trembling raced through his body, a reaction as uncontrollable as the flares from the nearby stars.

  The ship was silent, just another unfathomable artifact in a universe of strangeness.

  ****

  At last Mik heard his own voice inside his head again.

  He put a hand down and felt the cool, smooth texture of the metal-ceramic hull. It felt good to be surrounded by metal and plastics, wires and synth fabrics—things a man could understand.

  Even people were easily understandable compared with the chaotic void beyond the hull, he decided.

  He wondered how Talia was doing back at the dome. His mind drifted off into a daydream about her.

  I may just be too rough around the edges for a woman like that, a Radiant Acolyte and all. But if I ever make it back, I'm going to sweep her up and carry her away from that temple forever. We'll have four children, maybe five if we're blessed.

  If there's a dome to come back to.

  That thought jolted him back to awareness and action. There were people back home, his people, and they were counting on him to complete his mission, whether they even knew it or not. His parents. Sisters. Nieces and nephews. Talia was counting on him.

  No time to mope, tunnel rat. Let the black of night go on forever, as it always has. We left the caves of Earth long ago, and there's no going back. All of this is our home now.

  He stood and called back the display of clustered suns.

  Once again, this corner of the universe swirled in unfamiliar patterns outside the ship. But now he looked at it with a cold eye. It was more than just data, true, but all he had for interfacing with the beyond were the tools of humanity. He would use them.

  He methodically surveyed the interplay of forces between the stars. The ship's sensors could read where the influence of one star tapered off into the void and where it clashed with another. With the stars so tightly grouped compared with the galaxy at large, the spectrum was alive with clashing particles and furious stellar winds.

  Tower had said that Maelstrom would likely occupy a zone where the magnetic fields were strongest. "He will exist as a pattern of energy that a discerning eye would find too orderly, too unnatural," the god had told him during his instruction on the workin
gs of the ship. "You are talented at tracking down chaos within order, Mik. I hope that you can now do the opposite."

  He cataloged and organized the locations of the stars, planets and gas clouds that swirled throughout the cluster. He studied the celestial bodies in every available spectrum, noting the interplay of elemental forces.

  The hours ticked by unnoticed.

  He sometimes had to turn away and close his eyes, as the afterimages from staring at so many shining balls of gas and plasma, even toned down by the ship, sent blurry smears dancing across his vision.

  But the data cache grew.

  He piloted the ship deeper into the stellar cluster and formulated a rough plan of action.

  He dropped into Divine Space and fired short comm bursts across the bizarre subspace toward the most active stars. It was betting on pure chance, but he decided the random approach was a small enough time investment.

  He released probes that raced through the branches of Divine Space firing constant streams of information back to the ship. If there were any hostile species in this sector the probes would be beacons lighting a glowing path back to the ship, but that was a chance that would have to be taken.

  Mik set a course toward the center of the cluster. He was not able to use the ship's maximum speed as the proximity of the stars to one another made navigation difficult, especially without an active ship mind to guide him. In the greater part of the galaxy at large, there was much more distance between stars. In here, the gravitational pull of nearby bodies tugged at the ship, even within the undercurrents of Divine Space.

  His attention was riveted on piloting the vessel between the clashing elemental forces around him when a new—and welcome—symbol flashed in his vision.

  At last the torrent of information gathering was slowing, the survey complete.

  Mik returned to the central habitat and called up the ship's newly-finished map. It bloomed to life with impressive detail.

  The search parameters he had loaded had narrowed down his options to the most promising candidates; eleven locations in the star cluster where the magnetic fields were particularly energetic.

  He set a course for the first on his list. It was a gas jet three light years long that ripped a tear in the blackness of space. Long ago some passing body had energized a dormant gas cloud as it slipped between three closely-packed stars, leaving a marker that lit the sky to this day. The trails of ionized gas stretched between all three stars like some giant claw. It was a beautiful natural spectacle, but the ship's sensors soon proved it to be a lifeless and inert one.

  He commanded the ship to jump back into Divine Space and set a course for the next candidate on the list.

  This time his eyes glazed over and his mind went numb as the ship slipped along the bizarre trails of this strange netherspace. He recognized the signs of fatigue and tried to remember when he had last slept, but could not.

  He shrugged off the ship's cocoon of sensors that embraced his body and fell into a deep sleep. Back home in The City his sleep was normally stitched with vibrant dreams, but now, surrounded by the outlandish phantasmagoria of Divine Space and the almost confining density of stars in the cluster, his sleep was absolute. He was cut off from the stimuli of the universe around him, like a stone at the bottom of an ocean.

  Eventually an insistent chiming roused him to wakefulness.

  The ship had delivered him to his next target.

  He called up a visual on the main screen and nearly shouted in surprise.

  By all the gods!

  Even from millions of kilometers away and through all the stellar screening the ship employed to protect his vision, it was easy to see the natural war taking place in front of him. A doomed gas giant planet, three times the size of Lodias, the ship quickly calculated, orbited just beyond the corona of a star. The star was ripping away the atmosphere of the planet, pulling wispy tendrils of gas inward. Swirling storms the size of small worlds writhed across the planet's atmosphere.

  But the most astonishing views were not in the visual spectrum.

  He changed the view to inspect the underlying forces at play. The magnetic fields of the two bodies clashed in a colossal tug of war, sending lines of energy looping out into the star system in great arcs. The field lines wavered as if caught in a slow-motion explosion...

  Except for one segment equidistant between the star and the planet. The magnetic fields lined up in orderly rows in a revolving pattern, a logical symmetry that was beautiful to behold—and completely unnatural.

  Mik felt a strange sensation, starting in his belly and moving outward along his limbs. It was not quite a burning sensation, but a warmth that moved like heated mercury flowing directly beneath his skin.

  He'd felt similar sensations before when in the presence of Tower, but never so intense.

  He knew, on an intellectual level, what was happening. It was the blood riders that all humans carried, the nano-bugs that drifted through the arteries, repairing the body and acting as a conduit between gods and men.

  The power of the induced emotion was frightening, but he couldn't help but grin.

  Only a god could manipulate the blood riders. And he had come looking for a god.

  "Maelstrom?" His voice was barely a whisper.

  The answer arrived across every wavelength, in every spectrum, echoing in his mind as well as throughout the ship.

  "YES."

  18

  Thralls

  She floated through the streets of The City like a ghost, testing her new abilities.

  A ghost?

  The integration of the god's deep memories with her own was occurring with a seamlessness that still surprised her. In her life as a Radiant Acolyte, she never knew what a ghost was. The very concept was an ancient superstition that had not survived into her own time.

  Yet she had retrieved the idea from Tower's stored experiences as easily as if it had been her own memory.

  So, a ghost—a hidden spirit of the dead haunting the living.

  How odd.

  And yet, she could see how the comparison applied. There were several aspects of her consciousness that floated through The City, unseen, affecting the lives of others. Tower had bestowed god-like powers upon her. The people might see it differently.

  God or ghost?

  Now, for instance, she was observing Vance as he ran through the streets in his battle armor. He had already assembled a small group of volunteers—a squadron. Again, the word came to her unbidden from some distant memory cache.

  The squadron had been lethally effective the past few hours, confronting and eradicating six groups of the invaders. With each action they moved with greater purpose and confidence. It surprised her how quickly the unit coalesced into a cohesive unit. She had not witnessed this kind of martial camaraderie in her life, the bonding of men under combat conditions.

  But why should she have? For all her life and generations before her, the gods had provided all protection.

  A part of her accessed ancient texts of war stories, which she absorbed in seconds.

  Talia had highlighted on a grid map inside Vance's helmet the locations of all the alien enclaves she had found. The creatures were now scurrying into dark corners and underground tunnels. The combination of losing their contact with the Otrid ships and the disorientation from the newly punishing light spectrum under the dome had them reverting to instinctive ways, no longer a disciplined army of invaders.

  Vance's commands to his fighters crackled through the damaged communications net. As Talia watched, he led his squadron toward a tunnel leading down to a cargo distribution level. They fanned out in a tactical formation that Talia had fed to Vance, one more of the many bits of historical information plucked from that ancient sea of knowledge.

  Beyond that, Talia checked her impulse to guide every step of the action. She remained quiet as Vance moved closer to the enemy.

  If people are ever going to stand for themselves, I have to let them act on their own.
If Vance is ever going to be a leader, I have to let him lead.

  She believed what she was telling herself, but with hundreds of the alien creatures still loose it required enormous restraint to refrain from directing every movement of her new militia.

  The squadron had been inside the tunnel for only a few moments when the bark of weapons rang out. She directed one of the microdrones into the dim light of the tunnel and watched the action through its sensors. Vance was out in front of the other team members, crouched on one knee with his weapon pointed at the still-twitching form of one of the long-legged invaders. The heat signature along the barrel of the weapon glowed in her vision.

  What came next startled even her. The remaining aliens backed slowly away from their fallen comrade. They moved closer together, long legs sliding under and over each other's bodies. In seconds they were bunched together, rolled into a tight ball ten meters in diameter. The leathery armor they wore formed a ragged outer layer of protection.

  The rows of large eyes stared at the humans before them. Then the eyes slowly faded to a milky white shade, a reaction that Talia guessed was the equivalent of eyes closing.

  Vance slowly stood and took tentative steps toward the monstrous living ball. He looked over his shoulder and motioned for his reluctant squad to move in. He raised his gun again, but tentatively.

  An insight raced to the forefront of Talia's mind. She opened communication pathways from the microdrone to the squad's net.

  "Vance! They're surrendering. See if you can capture one."

  He glanced around, trying to find Talia's observation point. His gaze fixed on the drone as his helmet's readout gave him the location.

  "How can you tell?"

  "I have a lot of information at my disposal, Vance," she patiently replied. "It's a submission posture. It's like they're retreating back into a hole, an instinctive response."