by Ian Stewart
Now he’d found one.
There had been enough clues. He had been duplicating an awful lot of stuff. Much of it, he now knew, had been destined for the torture chambers. The numbers appalled him. But even so, most of his production must have been for other purposes. What of the endless tubes, wires, trays, brackets . . . ?
Suddenly, it all fell into place. The installation on Aquifer, the monastery of equals, was a sham. Camouflage. The torture chambers were incidental—necessary local color, a cover for its true purpose.
The Nether Ice Dome had been constructed for a very different reason. Aquifer was home to a Heaven. A secret Heaven. A special Heaven.
The conclusion was obvious, once the evidence was assembled, but enough of Sam’s training remained that he forced himself to ask the difficult questions. Intuitive leaps of logic, he knew, could give a powerful feeling of knowledge. But it felt just as certain when you were wrong.
Why did he think Aquifer housed a Heaven? Because he, personally, had been duplicating huge quantities of the same equipment that he had seen on his visit to the Heaven of Sadachbia. It had seemed familiar, but what he’d been duplicating were isolated components. When it was all assembled, it had looked different. And his mind had been focused on other things. Rivers of blood, mountains of entrails.
Nerydd.
Deduction confirmed. He’d been duplicating pieces of Heaven. But why did the Heaven have to be here?
First, because it would be stupidly and uncharacteristically inefficient to have him duplicating all that plumbing if it was intended for use elsewhere. Transibles were costly; duplication was cheap. More efficient by far to send him and the duplicator to the place where all the bits would be needed. Which, basically, was what they had done, except that the duplicator was already in place when he’d arrived.
So the duplicator must have arrived . . . how?
With the team that first constructed the facility at Aquifer’s pole.
Why had he been needed, then? The answer was chilling. He had been a replacement. None of the original construction team could be allowed to tell the outside world what they had wrought. Either they had been discorporated and were now living in the Heaven that they had built, or they had been killed.
Another question posed itself. When he’d been sent to Heaven, had he in fact visited the one on Aquifer? With the servomechs’ mastery of virtual reality, he could have been anywhere. For all he knew, everything he was experiencing might be fake . . . Nuts. He knew that the Heaven he had seen was real. He knew (wanted to believe?) that Nerydd had been real.
The levithon had been real, too.
That Heaven had had open skies, open enough for levithons to soar unimpeded. The Aquiferian Heaven had to be underground, underneath the monastery. They were not the same.
So why had Cosmic Unity sent him to a distant Heaven, at great cost, when there was one at hand? Because they wanted him to experience a Heaven, but they didn’t dare risk his deducing that there was one on Aquifer. A subterranean Heaven surrounded by walls of ice? A dead giveaway.
It all fit.
Finally, the big question: Why the need for such secrecy? Because—he racked his brains—because this was a relatively small Heaven . . . a select Heaven . . . a Heaven for important beings in the Church . . .
Oh, Cherisher. Of course.
Suddenly, Sam knew that he held in his hands a weapon that could destroy the filthy, perverted, twisted cult that called itself Cosmic Unity but had degraded into Cosmic Uniformity.
But, better still, there could be a way to save Fall. If he could get her accepted into Heaven, then her body would be preserved in its current state. She would be discorporate, but in what amounted to suspended animation. That would buy time to get her proper medical attention.
The monastery’s transible room on Aquifer was deserted, which was just how a disoriented, recohered Second-Best Sailor liked it. A few seconds ago he’d been on Talitha; now he was under the ice cap, back where he’d been held prisoner. He needed a few moments to take it in and adjust—it had all been so scary.
He pulled his thoughts together with a conscious effort. He was here to do one thing, and one thing only.
His golden suit—it looked and felt just like his old one, but it had the most amazing extra features—purred and flowed down from the platform, taking him to a place that really was a place, a location that could be observed and thus fixed in the classical universe.
The enormity of his task hit him like a shockfront from a subocean landslide. Somehow, he had to find the missing mariner, and he had only a single planet to search. He must be mad.
Still, negative thinking never did anyone any good. Every search must start somewhere; this one started with the neighboring rooms.
Empty.
Rounding a corner, he came upon a squad of armed Hytth. They recognized him as an intruder—probably the battle armor gave it away; he didn’t stop to inquire about their thought processes—and their reactions were quicker than his. His suit turned from liquid gold to a mirror finish as the laser bolts hit, reflecting them straight back at their sources.
The Hytth’s rifles exploded, shredding the creatures’ brittle exoskeletons. Pale blue gore dripped from the ruins of their forelimbs.
Second-Best Sailor gave silent thanks to the Precursors for Ship’s ability to grow an armored battle suit and grabbed the nearest Hytth, still gawping with disbelief at what had happened. His translator screamed:
“Where are the prisoners kept?”
He continued to shake the insectoid and scream at it until, terrified by the continuing loss of vital fluids, the creature told him.
Since there was a Heaven beneath Aquifer’s Ice Dome, Sam decided, there had to be a Vestibule. There had to be servomechs to run the discorporators and tend the dismembered bodies of Heaven’s occupants.
There had to be a way in, and he intended to find it. Quickly.
He returned to the duplicator room and retrieved various Church records, mostly of previous runs. He needed access to the hierocrat’s private archives, and that required a special qubit crystal. He had duplicated a small top-security batch of these crystals a few weeks after his arrival. He remembered it because of the tiny quantity and the excessive security precautions.
He knelt, and on the fifth attempt he held one in his hands. Now no paths were barred to him. If it worked. Time to find out.
He made his way through the corridors, taking care not to run into the occasional monk or menial, and certainly not into a band of Hytth security. Locked doors sprang open at the touch of the qubit crystal, hidden consoles activated, and secret computers mapped out a route for him. The route took him to the hierocrat’s personal suite, which was luxurious beyond anything he could ever have imagined: a basking pool, a simulated slithing grotto that even had a spume curtain, and a midden of ingestible cleg-vermin. There, in an encrypted glyphic, he found how to unlock the portal to Heaven.
How crass.
A secret tunnel, entered through a trapdoor.
13
NO-MOON
The mind seldom has the luxury of choosing. Most acts of free will reduce to a comparison of options. Circumstances seldom permit a truly unconstrained choice. Free will is what it feels like to make judgments in the context of complex constraints.
The Book of Lost Ephemera
Once a lion-headed Neanderthal woman had sat here, dangling her feet in the cool, clear water and laughing at the worms that hoped to eat her, as they tickled her skin. There had been a pier and, behind it, docks—an underwater polypoid town with ship’s chandlers, trading areas, and bars.
Now only the sea remained, and it was stained by the thick black ink of thousands of dead mariners. Their bloated corpses floated over the ruins of their dockside buildings, surrounded by shapeless lumps of burned lignoid and tangled lines from hundreds of boats that would never again sail No-Moon’s oceans.
Flocks of raucous buzhawks gorged on the carrion and fo
ught among themselves for the tastiest morsels of decay. Shyenas, lured from their hidden tunnels in the forest underbrush, prowled the shore in broad daylight, feasting on the rotting carcasses and keeping nervous ears open for the slightest whisper of danger. Below the harbor’s rancid surface, pudding eels tore at the banquet with dainty teeth, and sugarlips of many sizes and species hunted the pudding eels in vicious packs. Larger predators, numerous species of gulpmouths, circled in the mouth of the harbor, waiting for shoals of sugarlips to make a dash for the comparative safety of deeper waters. A solitary glutton, forty yards long with a maw to match, waited in ambush amid a forest of purple quelp, hoping that one of the gulpmouths would make a mistake and pass overhead.
On land, all visiting aliens who had failed to flee the planet were being rounded up by squads of heavily armed Cosmic Unity missionaries and taken to kindness camps for spiritual reorientation.
In the seas, the reefwives fashioned their remaining husbands into weapons, and debated their most effective deployment.
Cosmic Unity had not anticipated the violence of the reception that awaited it on the surface of No-Moon. After all, their fleet was on a mission of peace, bringing the good news of the Memeplex to ignorant unbelievers.
And at first, the violence had been so cryptic that the missionaries had not recognized it for what it was.
The first wave of missionaries had been a Fyx laser battalion, a Force of Charity, which would be backed up by aerial support in the form of a squadron of bliss bombers should it encounter resistance. They had been met by a small group of Neanderthal males, nomadic traders in search of profit, who had invited the missionaries into their homes as a welcoming gesture.
The Fyx acolyte-general, worried that this openness might be a trick, delegated a platoon of first-wave missionaries to fraternize with the Neanderthals, while the main Force of Charity began underwater operations to locate and convert the polypoid males that, so far as they knew, were the dominant sentient life form on No-Moon. Everything that the members of the platoon were offered to eat or drink in Neanderthal homes would be checked for toxins, harmful microorganisms, and Fyx-affective parasites. But Cosmic Unity’s equipment did not detect the reefwife virus, because the reefwives had disguised the virus temporarily as a dozen harmless fragments. Once inside the Fyx’s helical digestive passage, the fragments would assemble. But the virus would not start to replicate until six genetic switches had been flipped by their hosts’ circadian cycles. Six sunsets, six excesses of orange-yellow light, would be needed to flip the final gene and trigger viral replication.
It was a chink in the invaders’ elaborate defenses that the reefwives had envisioned in numerous timechunks as the mission fleet prepared its invasion. They knew that the first missionaries would be Fyx. So the infection had been tailored to Fyx biochemistry. It had been set up so that its action would be delayed, for maximum effectiveness.
While the reefwives bided their time, Fyx Flotillas of Blessedness prowled the oceans, boarding every mariner boat they found and offering to accompany its crew and captain back to port for initiation into the Great Memes of Cosmic Unity. Most of the mariners accepted the offer with enthusiasm, as the reefwives had primed them to do. Some, to ensure credibility, expressed disinterest and were promptly made prisoners. Many fled into the sea, leaving their boats at the mercy of the invaders. A few, who had volunteered for the privilege, fought the missionaries with hand weapons, killing and injuring several dozen, and were totally wiped out. And many forgot what they were supposed to do and made it up as they went along, with varying degrees of success.
Those that fled into the sea were pursued by the tiny subaquatics that always accompanied a Flotilla of Blessedness, netted, and taken back to port like the others. Some died, tangled in the mesh of the vast nets, along with huge quantities of marine life, innocents caught in the crossfire. Gulpmouths grew fat on the banquet.
The pursuit, capture, and slaughter persisted for six days. The Fyx acolyte-general was able to proclaim his growing success to his superiors on board the mission fleet’s mother ship. Across the planet, hundreds of thousands of polypoids had been brought to holding-tanks, where already they were responding to a barrage of sermons and diatribes. The Memeplex was disseminating, as it always did.
The seventh day was different. No reports arrived from the scouting parties on No-Moon. All missionary activity seemed to have stopped.
This eventuality was unprecedented, but the archives held plans for such a contingency. They advised caution in the face of numerous possible threats that might be consistent with the loss of contact; they also listed precautions to be taken to avoid those threats.
The mission fleet watched, and waited, in the hope of gaining a tactical advantage.
Soon, it would react.
Alpha: In my view the rebuilding of our defense systems is proceeding well. We remember past engagements, and repeat what triumphed then.
Beta: Yes, but the enemy is smart. It, too, remembers past engagements.
Gamma: With us? Have we encountered this enemy before?
Delta: Not this precise enemy, no. Its general kind.
Alpha: I/we know the pattern well.
Beta: Alpha is right.
Gamma: Beta is right.
Delta: Gamma is right.
Alpha: The training of the remaining husbands is proceeding according to plan. Their aggression hormones have more than doubled since we began our program of biochemical release.
Beta: And they are aware of this?
Gamma: “Aware” and “husbands” are not two words commonly found in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence.
Delta: Except in “I/we are aware that our husbands lack sense.”
Alpha: Pedant.
Gamma: The husbands are aware only that they feel bold and invincible.
Alpha: Nothing new there, then.
Gamma: They do not know that we are the source of these feelings.
Alpha: Nothing new there, either.
Beta: In this timechunk, many of our husbands are forfeiting their lives. Too many for me to feel happy with the decision to enhance their natural aggression.
Gamma: You have seen the timechunk in which their aggression is left unchanged?
Beta: Yes.
Delta: Fewer husbands die, but the invaders take our world and use it for their own incompatible purposes.
Alpha: And that, we cannot permit—whatever the price. What else, then, requires discussion? Are we agreed on strategy?
Beta: In the center of my perception I see that the virus trick works beautifully. A first wave of Fyx, as we foresaw. The Fyx nervous system is very susceptible to viruses.
Delta: Affirmed.
Beta: Emphasized.
Gamma: I believe that the tactic we are introducing against free-swimming marine troops has considerable merit.
Delta: In my perception, the jellyfish are a masterstroke.
Alpha: Delta is right.
Beta: Alpha is right.
Gamma: Beta is right.
Delta: Gamma is right.
All: Again we are in complete agreement. That is bad. How can we contingency-plan when we all envision the same contingencies? We risk complacency!
Alpha: Perhaps there is only one contingency that can be envisioned. This would explain its prevalence, and render complacency an irrelevant concept.
Beta: Alpha is right.
Gamma: Beta is right.
Delta: Gamma is right.
Epsilon: Delta is wrong. We are rebuilding our defenses too slowly.
All save Epsilon: Where did you come from?
Epsilon: I have been spun off as devil’s advocate. Your own intelligences have been diminished in order to augment mine. My role is to provide diversity of opinion. My own beliefs are irrelevant; my task is to challenge yours.
Delta: Epsilon, you say my/our preparations are too slow?
Epsilon: Yes.
Beta: But the preparations are proceed
ing with maximum speed. We cannot make any greater haste.
Epsilon: I did not say that we could act more quickly. I said that our fastest speed is too slow.
All: Then we have a problem.
A single transpod, containing two platoons of monks-at-arms, under the control of a war abbot, circled the port several times before making an exaggeratedly cautious landing in an open area that offered little cover for insurgents.
While half the force guarded the path for retreat, the rest made entry to the trade buildings. The ansible link between platoon and transpod was as clear as a bell. “What do you find?”
“Bodies, Podmaster,” said the war abbot.
Why cannot these fools be more precise? The podmaster sought clarification. “Bodies of polypoids?”
“Bodies of Fyx missionaries, Podmaster.”
Well, that was clear. Disturbingly so. “Any sign of live heathen?”
“No, Podmaster. We have secured the pools, and they are devoid of menace. Do I have permission to proceed with the plan?”
“Permission granted. Implement the plan with skill and precision!”
The monks were clad in class-nine armor. Beneath, they wore biological exclusion wraps of Precursor manufacture. They carried several more such wraps, which they used to enclose randomly selected Fyx corpses. “Samples acquired,” the warabbot reported.
At last, some efficiency. The operation had gone exactly to plan. “Return with them to the pod. We will lift the moment you are embarked.”
Just to be on the safe side, the transpod dropped a cluster of love bombs as it passed through the ten-thousand-foot level at three times the speed of sound. Every living thing within the port area would be reduced to a cinder. The bombs had an unusual feature: Before exploding, they emitted brief prayers for the lifesouls of the heathen that they were primed to slay. The gist of the prayers was that it was all for the heathens’ own good, and that they should rejoice because they would die in the glow of the love of the Lifesoul-Stealer.
The platoon’s specimens were sent for immediate analysis. It took the fleet’s biotechnicians thirty-six hours of uninterrupted work to discover the trick that the reefwives had played. They had used tailored viruses, cunningly equipped with a genetic time-delay system. Once activated, the viruses had hijacked the molecular replication machinery of the Fyx’s own cells and subverted it so that it created more viruses. Such a specific structure could not have arisen by accident. This virus had been specifically engineered to target Fyx nerve cells.