Belisarius I Thunder at Dawn

by David Drake

The Rajput glanced at Great Lady Holi. The old woman, he was even more relieved to discover, seemed to have retreated into a trance. It was almost as if she were not there. Only a statue of her, unmoving, rigid.

  Sati followed his glance, smiled faintly.

  "She is not Great Lady Holi. Not really. Great Lady Holi is simply a vessel. The divine being who dwells in that vessel is named Link."

  "A goddess? Or a god?" asked Sanga. He was rather proud that his voice neither stammered nor had a trace of tremor.

  "Neither," replied Sati. "Link has no sex, Rana Sanga. It is a pure being, a deva spirit sent by the gods. The new gods." The young princess straightened her back. "When Great Lady Holi dies, I will replace her as Link's vessel. I have trained for that sacred mission my entire life. Since I was but a babe."

  Watching her obvious pride in that announcement, Sanga felt a sudden pang. He did not find Sati attractive, as a man might find a woman. For all the comeliness of the young princess, hers was a type of aloof beauty which appealed to him not at all. His own wife was plump, plain-faced, and prematurely grey. She was also as warm as rich earth, and as playful as a kitten.

  Still, he felt a pang. He could not imagine this princess ever tickling a husband in bed, mercilessly, as his own wife delighted in doing. But he could not help that pang, thinking of this young woman as—whatever Holi was. Something not human.

  The inhuman thing in the room, he now learned, could read minds far better than any mortal.

  "DO NOT FEEL SORROW AT SATI'S FATE, RANA SANGA. YOUR SORROW IS MISPLACED. IT DERIVES FROM NOTHING MORE THAN IGNORANCE."

  He stared at Great La—at Link.

  "YOU ARE PRIVILEGED, RANA SANGA. YOU ARE THE FIRST HUMAN I HAVE SPOKEN TO SINCE I ARRIVED IN THIS WORLD, OTHER THAN MALWA."

  "Why?" he managed to ask.

  "IT IS NECESSARY. I DID NOT EXPECT BELISARIUS TO BE SO CAPABLE. THE HISTORICAL RECORD MISLED ME."

  Sanga frowned. Curiosity overrode all fear.

  "You knew of him?"

  "OF COURSE. IN THE WORLD THAT WAS, HE RECONQUERED THE ROMAN EMPIRE FOR JUSTINIAN. GIVEN THE SEVERE LIMITS UNDER WHICH HE WAS FORCED TO OPERATE, HE MAY HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST GENERAL EVER PRODUCED BY HUMANITY. HE WAS CERTAINLY ONE OF THEM. THE DISTINCTION, AT THAT LEVEL OF GENIUS, IS STATISTICALLY MEANINGLESS."

  Sanga did not understand the word "statistically," but he grasped the essence of her—of Link's—statement.

  "If you knew all that, why—"

  "I AM NOT A GOD. THE GODS THEMSELVES—THE NEW GODS, EVEN, WHO ARE REAL—ARE NOT GODS. NOT AS YOU UNDERSTAND THE TERM. NOTHING IN THE UNIVERSE CAN BE A 'GOD' AS YOU UNDERSTAND THE TERM. IT IS PRECLUDED BY CHAOS THEORY AND THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE."

  The last sentence was pure gibberish, but, again, Sanga understood the sense of Link's statement. For a moment, his Hindu orthodoxy rose in rebellion, but Sanga drove it down. The moment was too important for religious fretting.

  "Explain further. Please."

  "I COULD KNOW OF BELISARIUS, BEFORE I ARRIVED, ONLY THAT WHICH IS RECORDED IN HISTORY. THAT HE IS A GREAT GENERAL, IS A MATTER OF RECORD. THAT HE IS SOMETHING GREATER, IS NOT. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT UNEXPECTED CAPACITY. NO GENERAL COULD HAVE DONE WHAT HE HAS DONE. NO GENERAL COULD HAVE MANIPULATED ALL OF MALWA SO PERFECTLY. AND, CERTAINLY, NO GENERAL COULD HAVE REACTED SO INSTANTLY WHEN I DETECTED HIS DUPLICITY."

  For a moment, Link paused, as if in thought.

  Does such a being even "think"? wondered Sanga.

  "EITHER MY DATA ARE INCOMPLETE, OR OTHER FACTORS ARE AT WORK. I MUST DISCOVER WHICH. IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU CATCH HIM, FOR THAT REASON ABOVE ALL OTHERS."

  Awed, Sanga was; frightened, even. But he was still a Rajput. A Rajput king, he reminded himself.

  "I cannot promise you that," he stated harshly. "And I will make no vow which I cannot keep."

  In the silence which followed, Sanga had time to wonder at his punishment. Would this—divinity—be satisfied with stripping him of his lands? Or would it demand his life?

  The response, when it finally came, astonished him. From the divine being who secretly ruled Malwa, he had expected a Malwa reaction.

  "EXCELLENT. YOU ARE A TREASURE, RANA SANGA. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT WE ERRED, CHOOSING MALWA OVER RAJPUT. IN THE END, RELIABILITY SEEMED MORE IMPORTANT THAN CAPABILITY. FROM THE LONG VIEW OF TIME."

  The last sentence was chilling. Sanga suddenly grasped—even if only vaguely—the immensity of that "long view of time." As gods might see it.

  "NOW, AS A RESULT, WE MUST ADAPT. MORE OF RAJPUTANA'S ESSENCE MUST BE INCORPORATED INTO THE NEW WORLD WE ARE CREATING. MORE OF THAT CAPABILITY."

  Sanga was not entirely sure he found those words reassuring. For him, Rajputana's essence was not Rajput ability. It was the Rajput soul. Rajput honor.

  Again, the divine being called Link seemed to read his mind perfectly.

  "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, RANA SANGA. MALWA AND RAJPUT ARE BUT MOMENTS. STAGES IN A PROCESS, NOTHING MORE. TO YOU, THEY LOOM LARGE AND FIXED. TO THE NEW GODS, THEY ARE AS TRANSIENT AS MAYFLIES. ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE PROCESS."

  "What—process?" he croaked.

  "THE SALVATION OF HUMANITY FROM WHAT IT WILL BECOME. FROM THE HORROR OF ITS SELF-CREATED FUTURE. I WAS SENT BACK IN TIME TO CHANGE THAT FUTURE. TO CHANGE HISTORY.

  "I WILL SHOW YOU THAT HORROR. I WILL GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE FUTURE. THROUGH HUMAN DAMNATION. THROUGH FINAL POLLUTION."

  Sanga had time, just, to begin raising his hand in protest. His hand felt limply to his side.

  Visions gripped him, like a python.

  Chapter 19

  Blinding flash. A sun arose below the sun. The city beneath that sun vanished. Its inhabitants were incinerated before they knew it.

  The city's suburbs were not so fortunate. Charred, but not vaporized; its people screaming, their skins peeled from their bodies in an instant. Seconds later, the suburbs and its shrieking people were blown apart by a sweeping wall of wind.

  "SHOCK WAVE. OVERPRESSURE."

  Sanga understood neither term. Nor the next:

  "SEVENTY-MEGATON WARHEAD. EXCESSIVE. CRUDE. THE OTHER SIDE RESPONDED WITH MIRVS. CIRCULAR PROBABILITY OF ERROR WAS SO FINE AS TO MAKE UP THE DIFFERENCE."

  Another city. Obliterated, not by one giant sun, but by ten smaller ones. The difference, in the end, was nothing.

  "THE EXCHANGE CONTINUED FOR EIGHT DAYS. WITHIN A MONTH, HALF THE WORLD'S LIFE WAS GONE. WITHIN A YEAR, ALL OF IT, ABOVE THE LEVEL OF BACTERIA. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME HUMANITY EXTINGUISHED ITS OWN WORLD. IT WOULD NOT BE THE LAST."

  The world, barren. A single vast desert, so bleak as to make the Thar seem an oasis. The seas, grey and empty. The sky, black with an overcast thicker than anything Sanga had ever seen, in the worst of monsoon season.

  "FOUR TIMES HUMANITY DESTROYED THE EARTH. TWICE BY NUCLEAR FIRE, ONCE BY KINETIC BOLIDES, ONCE BY DISEASE."

  The only term he understood was "disease."

  "THE DISEASE WAS THE WORST.

  "A CRYSTALLINE PSEUDO-VIRUS WHICH TARGETED DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID. DNA IS THE BASIS FOR ALL LIFE. WITHOUT IT, LIFE IS IMPOSSIBLE. TRUE LIFE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE EARTH DESTROYED BY FIRE COULD BE REPOPULATED. EVEN RADIOACTIVITY DIES AWAY, GIVEN SUFFICIENT TIME. THIS PLAGUE—NEVER. EVEN THE BACTERIA ARE GONE. THE EARTH WILL BE BARREN FOREVER. HOME ONLY TO ABOMINATIONS."

  The earth, again. Barren, again. But now, everywhere that land could be seen, glittering with a network of gleaming points. Like a spider's web, or the tainted flesh of a plague victim.

  "YOU WONDER HOW THE EARTH COULD BE REPOPULATED AFTER ALL LIFE WAS DESTROYED. I WILL SHOW YOU."

  A great wheeling spiral. Made up of millions of points of light. The view swept closer. Each of those lights was a sun. Most suns were circled by worlds. Billions of worlds. Each different.

  Closer.

  Small bodies moved through that incredible black vastness. Slow, slow, slow, slow. Machines, Sanga realized. Vessels of some kind.

  "SPACECRAFT. LIMITED BY THE SPEED OF LIGHT."

  Sanga unders
tood the words: "speed" "of" "light." But they seemed meaningless. Light was. How could it have a speed?

  "IT DOES. 186,300 MILES PER SECOND. NOTHING IN THE UNIVERSE CAN MOVE FASTER. IT TOOK THESE SPACECRAFT CENTURIES TO REACH THE NEAREST STARS. BUT REACH THEM THEY DID. AND THEN, CENTURIES LATER, STARS BEYOND. AND THEN, MILLENIA LATER, STARS BEYOND. AND BEYOND AND BEYOND. AND BEYOND AND BEYOND.

  "MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF YEARS."

  Sanga's sense of time expanded. He saw the spacecraft spreading through the heavens. Saw an immense duration compressed into an instant. Saw the seeds of his world scattered throughout the spiral.

  "GALAXY. THIS GALAXY. THE MILKY WAY, YOU CALL IT. HUMANS WILL ALSO REACH ANDROMEDA, AND THE MAGELLANIC CLOUDS—ALL THE GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL GROUP. NO OTHER CONSCIOUS LIFEFORM HAS EVER BEEN FOUND. NOW THAT HUMANS—FORMER HUMANS—HAVE SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY AND ITS NEIGHBORS, THEY HAVE FILLED THAT ECOLOGICAL ZONE WHICH YOU CALL 'INTELLIGENCE.' NO OTHER WILL EVER ARISE.

  "AND HUMANITY HAS DESTROYED ITSELF. IT HAS BECOME NOTHING BUT MONSTROSITIES. A DISEASE. THE POLLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE."

  A world of gigantic trees. Large monkey-like creatures swung through its branches. They were hairless, however, and wore clothing. Cloth strips tightly bound, allowing free movement of their limbs. And a short, muscular tail. Their fingers were long, their toes grotesquely so. For all essential purposes, they were quadrupedal. One of them swung into view.

  Its face was human. Had once been human.

  A world of water, landless, pocketed by vast floating sargassoes. Fish-like creatures swam through that world-girdling ocean. Once of them was suddenly seized by another shape darting from under a ledge of sargasso weed. Odd shape. Bastard shape. Its flukes moved up and down, like a dolphin, and its body was a streamlined torpedo. But it retained very short, stubby arms—barely more than hands thrusting forward from vestigial shoulders. The hands stuffed the "fish" into a wide mouth lined with needle teeth. Then, carefully separated the fish bones and placed them in a pouch tied to its neck.

  A closer view. That face, too—that wide-eyed, gape-mouthed, needle-toothed, almost noseless face—had once been human.

  A heavy world, thick with atmosphere. Crab-like shapes scuttled across its low-lying surface, busily constructing edifices of some kind. Their arms and hands, though bulky, were still close to human. But they moved on six legs. The rear limbs retained a faint trace of their bipedal origin. But the mid-limbs were sheer nightmare. Adaptations of the ribcage.

  Once human.

  Monstrosity followed monstrosity. Some were so bizarre that Sanga could not see any remnant in them of humanity.

  Nor was Earth the only planet blasted into lifelessness. Sanga saw thousands of those worlds, ravaged and destroyed by—"nuclear fire," "kinetic bolides"—other things. "DNA plague," eight times. Three planets, drifting together in an empty void beyond time and space itself, had been "rotated about their axis." Many were not even planets, any longer. Simply shards drifting in space. "Very large kinetic bolides."

  Sanga understood none of the terms, but he understood the reality. He was a soldier. Horror was no stranger to him. Though he had never, in his worst nightmares, imagined devastation on such a scale.

  "YOU WONDER IF I AM LYING TO YOU."

  No, he did not. He was inside the mind of Link, now, and understood its basic nature. Link was a "divine being," yes—Sanga could sense the reality of the great new gods which had created it. He could see those perfect, beautiful faces. (The beauty, oddly, did not move him. It was like Sati's beauty, magnified a thousand times. But he had no doubt they were beautiful. And perfect. And divine.)

  Nor did he doubt that Link was showing him a true vision. It was not in the nature of the being called Link to lie. Its mind followed the path given to it, like a waterwheel turns with the stream. It could no more lie than a waterwheel could decide to turn against the current.

  "THE FINAL ABOMINATION HAS NOW APPEARED."

  A luminous shape swam in the void. At first, Sanga thought it to be some kind of ethereal moth, until he grasped the scale of the thing. Whale-sized. Bigger. He could not make out the precise shape of the creature's body. It was not entirely material, he sensed. Much of that shape was—magical?

  "FORCE FIELDS. ENERGY MATRIX."

  Meaningless words.

  "THIS TOO WAS ONCE HUMAN. BUT IT HAS NOT A TRACE LEFT OF ITS HUMAN LEGACY. OF HUMAN PURITY. IT IS NOT EVEN ALIVE."

  How?

  "THEY ORIGINATED AS BIOLOGISTS, STUDYING THE DNA PLAGUE. SEEKING A CURE, OR A VACCINE. THEY FOUND NO CURE, NO VACCINE. THE DNA PLAGUE, BY ITS NATURE, CANNOT BE STOPPED. ANY ANTIDOTE OR SERUM WOULD BE DNA-BASED ITSELF. SIMPLY MORE FOOD FOR THE PLAGUE."

  "Biologists," "vaccine," "serum"—Sanga understood none of them. But he could follow the sense behind the words.

  "INSTEAD, THEY FOUND SOMETHING ELSE. THEY EMBRACED POLLUTION. THEY CAST THEIR OWN CHILDREN INTO DAMNATION. THEY ABANDONED LIFE ITSELF. THEY DISCARDED DNA AND SUBSTITUTED A SOULLESS MECHANISM OF THEIR OWN CREATION."

  Again, Sanga saw the glittering network of crystals. Like a spider's web—simultaneously repellent and beautiful. But this was not a web covering a planet. This crystalline web ran through the very structure of the luminous giant moth—whale?—moving through the heavens.

  "THEY FOUND A LIFELESS SUBSTITUTE FOR DNA. FOR LIFE ITSELF. A DERIVATIVE FROM THE SAME CRYSTALS WHICH DESTROYED DNA. THEY EVEN BREATHED A PARODY OF INTELLIGENCE INTO THEM. SELF-GUIDED CHAOTIC INTELLIGENCE, NOT THE OBEDIENT CLEANLINESS OF THE COMPUTER. THE ABOMINATION IS COMPLETE. POLLUTION IS ALL THAT REMAINS."

  Sanga did not understand the term "computer," though he sensed that Link itself bore its likeness. The rest—a question came to his mind.

  What are they called?

  "WE HAVE NO NAME FOR THEM BEYOND MONSTERS. THEIR CRYSTALS CALL THE ABOMINATIONS WHO CREATED THEM 'THE GREAT ONES.' "

  What do these—"Great Ones"—call themselves?

  Hesitation, for the first time. Reluctance? Sanga wondered.

  "THEY CALL THEMSELVES PEOPLE."

  And what do they call their crystal creatures?

  Definite hesitation. Not reluctance, Sanga realized. Ultimate—distaste.

  "THEY CALL THEM PEOPLE."

  When Rana Sanga came back to his senses, he realized that very little time had passed. The Great Lady Holi and Sati were still seated before him, quietly, their hands in their laps.

  "Now you understand, Rana Sanga," said Sati softly. "Enough, at least."

  Sanga opened his mouth, closed it. He had been about to protest that he understood very little. Certainly not enough. But he sensed there was no point in such a protest. Besides, he had given his oath. That, at least, he did understand.

  Again, Great Lady Holi seemed to read his mind. But, to Sanga's relief, when she spoke her voice had resumed a shell of humanity.

  "You do not need to understand more, Rana Sanga," said Link's vessel. "Not now, at least."

  Stubborn pride rose in the Rajput.

  "Why did you come here? To this—to our time?"

  "Analysis showed this was the optimum time and place to change history. That task is very difficult, Rana Sanga. History is like a great river. Its currents cannot be dammed. They will simply spill over the levees. A new channel must be dug. A wide, deep, great channel. That task is very hard. The new gods determined that this was the optimum period for making the sharp change needed in humanity's course. Perhaps the only moment when it would be possible."

  Stubborn:

  "Why?"

  "Because in this historical era both of humanity's possible futures exist at the same time. For the only time in history when both could be changed simultaneously. The seed of humanity's actual destruction lies in that abomination called Rome. The seed of its potential glory lies in Malwa India."

  Stubborn, still:

  "Why?"

  "The true future lies here, because only in ancient India did humanity begin to grope toward that truth. What you call the varna a
nd the caste system. Your conceptions are mired in superstition and ignorance, but your crude understanding provides the framework for beginning the necessary eugenics program which will preserve the human race. That is why, despite their limitations, we have maintained the Malwa lineage intact, and are shaping everything around that seed. In the Malwa of today, you see only the most primitive germ of the future. But in the end, after millenia of careful genetic management, the new gods will emerge. Not the handful of this time, of this polluted future, but the mighty host of the true future we will create."

  Sati interrupted, coldly: