“—nuclear strike from one hundred meters. I know, I know, but if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be in this mess. Can you understand how frustrating it is to be cooped up in here with nothing to do?”
Roche listened, stunned. That was her voice. She remembered the conversation, but not the context.
“The sooner we’re back in HQ, Box, the better...”
And with these words, she placed the memory: in her quarters on the Midnight. She had been bemoaning her lot—bored by her mission, resentful of her attachment to the Box and frustrated by Captain Klose’s refusal to let her examine the mysterious life-capsule the ship had picked up in deep space. This was where it had all started.
But why was she hearing it now?
There was only one answer: this wasn’t just dust she was falling through...
“Hello?” she called.
She didn’t use her suit’s radio. She simply spoke aloud.
“Hello, Morgan,” replied a familiar voice. “I wondered when you would guess.”
She wasn’t as surprised as she thought she should be. “These are your voices?” she said. “Your memories?”
“The boundaries of this identity known as ‘the Crescend’ are difficult to define at the best of times,” he said. “In my long life I have been many individuals, have spawned many components. Like the Box, for example: it came from me, and its memories now form part of me, but it was not me—at least not in the way you would understand the concept. All the voices you hear around you, they are memories to which I have access, and yet none of them are truly mine.”
She imagined the Crescend as a spider sitting in the middle of an enormous web, reeling in experiences along silken threads, capturing and absorbing entire minds full of information....
“A colorful analogy,” he said. “And perhaps not totally inaccurate.”
“You’re reading my mind?”
“I am aware of what you are thinking,” he said.
“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”
“Because the questions you ask do not allow it.”
The voice of the High Human came clearly over the babble, but the endless whispering—combined with the sound of the ship slowly being battered—was making it difficult to concentrate.
She glanced at the forward view screen, at the dust particles of the ring that were taking up the entire display now, as impenetrable as a dust storm.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said. “The ring is you. Or the other way around.”
“Both, and neither. The ring is a physical construct upon which this identity is presently generated.”
“A computer?” said Roche, lifting her voice unnecessarily to be heard above the growing noise.
“The term is grossly inadequate,” he said with no hint of condescension. “It is composed of the mass of an entire solar system liberated and allowed to interact as computational components: every atom of an ever-changing matrix circling—and powered by—the system’s sun. A sun which, half a million years ago, birthed the species from which we sprang.”
It was hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of what the Crescend was describing. As camouflage, it was perfect: of everyone she had met, only the Heresiarch had any serious idea that the ring might be more than it seemed. The unsuspected truth explained the odd electrical impulses, and the navigational hazard the ring occasionally posed: even something as nebulous and innocent-looking as a cloud of dust could be disturbed by passing ships and would possess the means to defend itself.
But this wasn’t all he was telling her. Birthed, he had said.
“That’s why we’re here,” she said. “You, and everyone. Sol System is where it all began.”
“It may not be much to look at anymore,” he said, “but yes, this is where it all began. For those who know, the system is something of a symbol. Not a shrine; one’s origins are not to be worshipped. Sol System just is, and that is enough.”
“But what happened to the planets?” One of them, she assumed, must have been Humanity’s homeworld.
“That is a long story, Morgan,” he said. “Too long for now.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“There isn’t time,” he said. “You haven’t that much left.”
“So I am going to die?”
“Do you want to die?”
Another evasive answer. Before she could respond, however, the ship lurched violently, tossing her from side to side in her seat.
When the ship settled again, she said: “Can you get me out of here? Can you fix the fighter so I can use it and get back to the Phlegethon? If it hasn’t already been destroyed, that is.”
“Far from it, Morgan. The council has experienced good fortune since the enemy became aware of your decision. No longer required to concentrate their efforts on one location—in order to draw you out, to force you to make a decision, and to influence what that decision would be—many of their number have retreated from the system and begun the long journey home. To their hosts’ homes, I should say. As the war in Sol System winds down, preparations for the war throughout the galaxy are heating up. We sit on the brink of a new age, Morgan: today, the peaceful domination of Humanity, founded on near-genocide; tomorrow, the battlefield of justice, in whose days lives will be lost and civilizations will fall, and which might, ultimately, lead to a more balanced future.”
“Is that what you want, then?” Roche felt the same confusion about his motives that she had the first time she and the High Human had talked. “I still don’t know whether you believe I made the right decision or not.”
“Does my opinion matter?”
“Of course it does!”
“If I tell you that you made the right decision, I will be accused of wanting war. If I tell you that you made the wrong decision, I will be accused of wanting to commit genocide upon the enemy.”
Roche fell quiet for a while.
“I just wish there had been another alternative.” Her words were soft and low, barely audible above the whispers that filled the space around her.
If the Crescend had heard, he didn’t answer.
The temperature continued to rise, along with the turbulence, and the voices were louder, harder to think through. A golden haze tinged the air around her; the walls of the ship themselves seemed to glow.
“Tell me about your final conversation with Adoni Cane,” the Crescend said.
“What? Why?” She was irritated that the Crescend seemed to be trying to distract her rather than doing anything to actually help her.
“Did he reveal anything to you that you didn’t already know about him?”
“Like the fact that he’s an alien, perhaps?”
There was a sound like a sigh. “He said this?”
“He said Humanity wiped out his creators and took over the galaxy. Did you know about this?”
“We suspected,” the Crescend said. “Few records exist from that time, and only the oldest memories of the most inward-seeking of my Caste speak of such events, but we have always known of another race that preceded ours—which may have even co-existed with us for a time. It seemed likely that it was destroyed in the war about which we had also heard rumors. The possibility also existed that these two suspicions were linked to the emergence of the enemy and their convergence on Sol System. Linking all three was the most elegant solution.”
“That explains why we couldn’t find his parent Caste,” Roche said. “He never had one, did he? It was a waste of time looking.”
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Morgan—as you yourself recently said. We needed confirmation before we could be sure.”
She suspected he was still trying to distract her, but she didn’t care. She needed the distraction to take her mind from the sounds of the ship being bombarded by the dust outside.
“So who were they?” she said loudly. “Where did they come from?”
“They are referred to only by euphemism.” The Crescend’s vo
ice never seemed to rise in pitch despite the ever-increasing noise within the cockpit. “And then most frequently as ‘the Concinnity.’ Where they originated, however, remains a mystery.”
“Cane said that they’re a group mind, and that they plan to resurrect the species from the data in their introns.”
“It was always thought unlikely that revenge was the only thing on their agenda,” the Crescend said. “Resurrection of the species was always considered a possibility.”
“What are you going to do about it if they do?”
“What we have always done: observe.”
“You’ll let it happen?”
“It is in accordance with your decision, Morgan.”
“But my decision was made with the understanding that they were Human! That if they wiped us out, there would still be Humans left, even if it was them!”
“There will always be Humans, left,” the Crescend assured her. “They will never destroy the High Caste. At least not until they have themselves evolved to our level, in their own way. And numerous Low Castes will survive too. The worst-case scenario would be that the mundanes will be wiped out, and then only for a time. In the enemy’s eyes, it would even the score; in our eyes, it changes little.”
Roche pondered this as best she could through the racket. It was true. As important as it seemed to her, the activities of the mundanes didn’t amount to much in the big scheme of things. The High Humans were doing the real work, whatever it was, on a galactic scale. The mundanes just filled in the gaps, gave their superiors something to watch in their spare time....
The cockpit’s life-support suddenly failed, sending a blast of hot air into her face. She made sure her suit was completely sealed, then shut her eyes. Clutching the arms of the crash-couch, she rode out the turbulence, not knowing how much longer it would last and, irrationally, afraid that it might never stop.
“Would you change your mind?” The Crescend’s voice was clear and calm in her helmet. “Knowing what you now know, do you think you made the wrong decision?”
She kept her eyes closed and fought down the fear by focusing on his question. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Cane and his race deserved at least a fighting chance. I just wish I hadn’t been so stupid.”
“In what sense?”
“Cane told me he was Human, and I believed him!”
“He never said that, Morgan.”
“Yes he did,” she said. “After Palasian System, when we woke him from that coma Linegar Rufo put him in. He tapped out a message in code—!”
“Yes, but that’s not what he said,” said the Crescend. “His exact words were: ‘I am as Human as you are.’“
Her eyes opened, as if upon a realization she had been blinded to.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “That I’m not Human?”
“You are as Human as I am, Morgan. As Human as Cane. Even as Human as the Box, if you like,” he said. “That’s the way you were made.”
She wanted to recoil from what the Crescend was saying, but she was trapped in her suit, in a disintegrating fighter. She had nowhere to hide from the words, no way to avoid them. All she could do was listen to him.
“The High Caste needed someone to make a decision it was not capable of making—or was not prepared to make. But we could hardly trust such a judgment to someone lacking the necessary attributes. Since mundanes are inherently unreliable, and since the person we required simply did not exist, we decided to make one. We made you, Morgan.”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“You are determined and not easily swayed. You see all sides of a dispute and try to be fair. You have a keen sense of duty, on many levels. You are honorable, and will not shirk from the truth. You may not see yourself as such, Morgan, for we also gave you a sense of humility, but you are a good person. A good Human. If the fate of the mundanes was to rest in your hands, it was important for you to be so.
“On the other hand, you needed access to information and capabilities beyond the access of a normal mundane—especially once the time came to bring you face to face with the enemy, in the form of Adoni Cane—so my relationship with the Commonwealth of Empires was exploited to allow the Box to fall into your hands.
“The only thing that set you apart from the mundanes around you was your ability to detect the enemy, and even that was limited. You were, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary person, but one fashioned in such a way that you would not break under extraordinary circumstances. That was our gift to you, Morgan—one which has served you in good stead these last few weeks.”
“How much of me...?” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Her mind was full of conflicting images, thoughts, and feelings. Everything seemed to be shaking, falling apart around her.
“I can assure you that you are as real as anyone.”
“Ascensio—the orphanage—?”
“Real memories,” he said. “Taken from someone else.”
She closed her eyes. “Bodh Gaya?”
“Your own experiences. Everything from your arrival at the Military College was you. But that makes those memories no more ‘real’ to you than the others. They are all yours, Morgan. They all contribute to who you are.”
She thought of the parents she had hoped to find one day, and whom she had forgotten upon joining COE Intelligence. She remembered her friends in the orphanage, and the conditions that had led her to flee her home planet. She saw again, as clearly as though it happened only yesterday, the flash of the COEI Gegenschein’s engines as it broke orbit and headed for her new home, her new future.
All hers.
All faked.
A shrieking of tortured metal rose around her, as though the ship were tearing up.
“I’ve never had any choice, have I?” She raised her voice to be heard over the noise, even though she knew the Crescend could read her mind just as easily as it ever had.
“Of course you have, Morgan. That was the whole point.”
“But you made me in order to do something. There was no way I could avoid that. There’s no way you would’ve let me!”
“Perhaps not, but—”
“And could I have avoided all of this?” She saw Maii’s body, the Ana Vereine’s pyre, the golden glow of the cockpit around her. “Was I always intended to end up here?”
“That question is irrelevant,” said the Crescend. “You are here now, and the ‘now’ is all that matters.”
A siren wailed in her ears.
“Why are you bothering to talk to me at all?” she said angrily. “Why ask me about Cane? Why not just lift the information from my memories? What is it you are after? You want me to absolve you for what you’ve done? Is that it?”
“I have no need of absolution, Morgan. I have no ulterior motives, either. Your role in this phase of the war is truly finished.”
“So now I am being thrown out with the trash?” she shouted. “Is that it?”
“You are not a robot, Morgan,” the Crescend said.
“But I’m not real!”
“You may find it difficult to accept, but you are as genuine a being as anyone else you have met. You have mind, you have will, and you have character. Where your body actually came from is irrelevant.”
“Do you expect me to accept that?”
“In time, I think you will.”
“But I don’t have time,” she said. “The fighter’s burning up!”
“Yes,” the Crescend said with no suggestion of remorse. “It is. In fact, you have less than a minute before it disintegrates completely.”
She fought down a surge of panic, resisted the tears pressing at the backs of her eyes.
“I’m frightened,” she said, the words both a whisper and a sigh.
The Crescend said nothing.
She closed her eyes again, bracing herself as the fighter began to shake violently. The sound of voices was drowned out by the rattling and creaking of the ship. She thought she might be screaming, but she could hear n
othing at all over the noise. She was sound: sound and movement: movement and pain: pain and—
With a burst of heat, everything went silent.
Epilogue
There was no pain; there was no grief. There was only the darkness drawing her in, consuming her. She didn’t resist the warm sensation; she allowed herself to be taken.
The familiar voice of the Crescend filled her with a strange relief. But he sounded different somehow. Closer—almost as though the words were emanating from herself.
She hesitated for a moment.
The Crescend didn’t respond, and an interminable silence followed. She felt something approximating panic wash over her, soaking the empty dark around her.
Another silence followed before the Crescend spoke again.
APPENDIX
THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITY
AN OPEN-ENDED QUESTION.
(by Provost Rejuben Tade, extracted from his welcoming address to the Guild of Xenoarchaeologists’ 13,333rd Decannual Intake Expo.)
It is said that unless you know where you started, it is difficult to tell where you are heading. You can plot your course with as much precision as you like; you can map vectors, measure velocity and distance to the nth degree, but without those vital initial coordinates, you might as well be flying blind.
The authors of this axiom were, of course, referring to navigation on land or sea, or even in space. But why should it not be equally applicable to Humanity as a whole?
Anyone with an education would know that the origins of our species are clouded in mystery, buried under the obfuscating weight of five hundred millennia. Half a million years: that’s an awful lot of dust. And if we look closely at this dust, we can make out lumps and bumps along the surface which suggest things that might be buried there. But unless we actually brush away these layers of dust, we would never know exactly what lies beneath. When we do, sometimes we find what we imagined we would; other times we find nothing at all. Most of the time, though, we simply reveal new landscapes of dust which seem to bear little relation to the ones above and which might, too, reveal nothing about what remains hidden beneath.
The Dark Imbalance Page 40