Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “What end is that?” Cromatron asked, stabbing the grooves in his skull, as if to get them to separate further to accommodate his swelling brain.

  It was Vassy who answered, to Cromatron’s surprise. “The Omega point. When the drop of water that is each of us is reunited with the ocean.”

  Angel Lady smiled at him. “Who’s to say the much longer path you’re on, filled with so much more suffering, is the wrong path? It may be we Crystans that are the ones living in a fool’s paradise, in a hell world so attractive we never want to leave, and so one only Lucifer himself could have designed. The best advice I can give you was given by one of Earth’s Zen masters: hold no attachments, and entertain no aversions.

  “It may be our shared destiny,” Angel Lady continued, “to enjoy every hell world and every heavenly realm and everything in between without identifying too strongly with any of them. It’s an enticing notion that I’m afraid is lacking from your culture and mine.”

  She disappeared from their view, returning no doubt to her caretaking of her world.

  “Sonny will be very pleased with us,” Cromatron said, snickering.

  “Yes, he will. But you found nothing of value in Angel Lady’s words?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? All I know is that the Zalics crystals, even in their dormant state have been good to us, making us smarter, better able to chase after that which gives us the greatest pleasure. If that is evil, I’m only too happy to embrace it.”

  Vassy grunted. “Knowing no matter what we do it will make us more enlightened one day is rather freeing, isn’t it?”

  They shared a laugh.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  THE COLLECTORS’ MENAGERIE

  THE FARAN GALAXY

  PLANET SCALAZAR

  Sopos glided toward the podium, accompanied by his two centurions. He was far too feeble at his age to bear his planet’s gravity any longer, and far too valuable to Pan Galactica to let die, hence the anti-gravity suit. Mercifully, his skeletal facial features would ensure that even as a corpse he’d be strikingly handsome—no small boast in politics where every sliver of advantage mattered. Very few planets and very few galaxies accepted the feeble federation of galaxies’ representatives known as Pan Galactica as legitimate, since most of those galaxies were still at war. Pan Galactica had arisen from the intellectual elite of those various galaxies, which made it even more suspicious to the layman, and many of those laymen were among this planet’s senior administrators assembled at this conference. Pan Galactica was still more concept than reality, based on a commitment to abandoning all hostilities between galaxies in the federation, a commitment so far that only the intellectuals forming its tribunal held to. And they weren’t always of the same mind on how to forge this peace, and what galaxies were worth including in the accord.

  Halfway down the sloped gallery seating toward the pit of the amphitheater where Sopos would plead his case, someone headed up the aisle. He could have been seeking out the nearest bathroom, the refreshments table out in the hall, or slipping away to confer with another delegate.

  But he was on his way to assassinate Sopos.

  Or so one of his centurions thought.

  The centurion, availing himself of the same anti-gravity boots that Sopos was using, shot toward the man like a bullet, catching him by the throat in one hand and taking him up and away. He kept tightening his grip until the man extended his arm containing the syringe that had been hidden in his pocket up until now, hoping for mercy. He got it. The centurion finished tightening down on his throat, exploding his head from the too-rapid rise in blood pressure. For a member of that species, the Ralcic, that’s all it took. Their brains had no protective hard shell, just a soft shell that was no match for the centurion’s grip.

  As the centurion on Sopos’s left dispatched that assassin, the centurion on his right elevated himself even higher into the air to address those rising from their seats in mock horror and excitement, pointing. The additional assassins in among the audience’s numbers, passing themselves off as Sirens sounding the alarm were dispatched just as quickly. The centurion that had gained elevation for the task fired from his eyes lasers calibrated to first scan the head it was aimed at for all intelligence inside it, and then, when the mark had nothing left to offer, incinerated the assassin on another frequency, so there was nothing left for any forensics crew to pore through. The centurion had two eyes and so could only dispatch two assassins in this manner at one time.

  But as it turned out, there were over a dozen assassins in the room who had chosen to activate at what they perceived as a favorable opening.

  Six more of Sopos’s entourage decloaked. They were already positioned high in the air over the assembly. They had been scanning everyone’s mind preemptively, hardly waiting for assassins to get the upper hand. Still, they needed to wait for them to strike, so they could replay the scanned footage from the minds of the assassins, to prove intent, and then run the slow-mo playback of the assassin preparing to fire, if not actually firing, to ensure the skeptics agreed that Sopos had been acting solely in a defensive capacity all along.

  With the other assassins instantly dispatched, the room settled down. The remaining assassins decided this was not the edge they were hoping for, with the crowd rankled, and Sopos’s other centurions otherwise predisposed. Those assassins were safe for now, unfortunately, as Sopos had to play by the rules. At least in here.

  He made it onto the podium without further ado and spoke into the mike. “Thanks for the warm welcome,” he said to chuckles from the crowd and faint applause. He had no doubt their response was more for the display he’d just put on than for anything he was about to say. Usually, after he was done speaking you could hear a pin drop. And a moment after that—everyone wanted to kill him. He had measured hopes of doing better today.

  “We have a ripe opportunity,” Sopos said, availing himself of the amphitheater’s AI running language translation for everyone in the room, forwarding that to their in-ear COMMS, or for those that had them, directly to their mindchips or nanite hive minds percolating through their neural webs. “The Collectors have been fool enough to imprison the Gypsy Galaxy before modifications got underway to weaponize the entire galaxy for war.”

  He paused for the gasps he expected. He wasn’t disappointed. Murmurings were threatening to overtake anything he had to say as the sound of the din continued to rise, the delegates whispering among themselves. If Sopos didn’t shut it down they’d soon be shouting at one another and at Sopos.

  “By the time retrofits are complete,” he said, talking right over the noise, “we will be more than able to break free of The Collectors’ grip,” Sopos continued.

  He was interrupted by a heckler jumping to his feet and shouting. “Impossible! No one has broken free in over a million years!”

  Sopos held up his arm disarmingly. “If you will permit me a few moments to convey the rest of our breaking intel to you so you can decide for yourselves what is possible and what isn’t.”

  The heckler took his seat, with a little help from the people seated at his sides, who pulled him into it.

  “The spy network of the Gypsy Galaxy, known as the Shadow Warriors, has already found plenty of evidence that The Collectors have been doing far more than just imprisoning us. They’ve been using the technologies of the captive galaxies to incite conflict, playing us off one another, keeping us so preoccupied with destroying each other’s civilizations when we trace those technologies back to their ‘source’ that we fail to focus our ire where it truly belongs, at The Collectors themselves.”

  “Nonsense!” the same heckler screamed, jumping to his feet. This time he was joined by many others shouting similar epithets, some rising from their seats, others not bothering, figuring their voices would carry far enough anyway.

  Again Sopos raised his arm in a gesture calling for order. “It is highly possible that The Collectors’ knack for keeping us at each other’s throats lies in negotiating with peopl
e even more corrupt and manipulative than the people seated in this room.” Not surprisingly, everyone was up on their feet now trying to shout him to death.

  Sopos waved at one of his centurions to engage the noise cancellation technology in the chamber so he could easily talk over the throng. In the forced silence some of them settled down. Others thought they might get his attention by trying once more to kill him. There were enough of the assassins activating now that the expression “all hell broke loose” seemed suitable.

  Sopos’s remaining centurions decloaked. There were enough of them to make his point for him. The ones who refused to settle down did once they saw the latest empty seats beside them with piles of dust where formerly delegates sat, and the crowd-control number of centurions Sopos had brought.

  Once everyone was back in their seats, Sopos gestured for the majority of the centurions to cloak themselves once again so he didn’t seem like he was trying to force the outcome of the debate.

  “If what the Shadow Warriors say is true, then continued war with one another’s galaxies feeds the Collectors’ agenda, not ours, keeps us imprisoned forever, and what’s more limits your profits.”

  Dead silence.

  He should have thought to lead with that, these corrupt bastards. It was no surprise most of them were profiting greatly from the ongoing skirmishes between galaxies, both from the “inevitable” destruction and the remaking/rebuilding of the damaged worlds. Sopos could bet that every one of these sons of bitches was on the payroll of some galactic-scale financial-industrial-military complex. It was time to speak the language they would respond positively to.

  “If the Gypsy Galaxy can free us all, then that militarized galaxy becomes our negotiating tool for exacting our revenge on the TGCs and TGEs that imprisoned us here. A costly revenge, I assure you, that will require the rebuilding of entire galaxies, not mere worlds.” More murmurings from the crowd; this time the din sounded a lot more supportive by its sheer respectfulness, refusing to crawl over Sopos’s voice and the noise cancellation technology. Rebuilding entire galaxies could be profitable indeed.

  “More to the point,” Sopos continued, “whatever profits you’re able to extract, selling munitions to your home galaxies and repairing their damaged worlds in the aftermath of intergalactic war with others within The Collectors’ Menagerie, will be dwarfed by arms sales throughout the universes from which we all came. Why settle for selling to one galaxy when you can sell to the billions and billions of them throughout an entire multiverse?”

  The room exploded with zealous acceptance of his “infallible” reasoning as if they’d all been struck by clapping, whistling, and caterwauling disease.

  “But…” his chief heckler said, jumping to his feet yet again.

  Sopos, already anticipating his objection, said, while holding up his arm arrestingly, “Remember, people, The Collectors’ Menagerie as a prison has existed for over a million years. Many of the TGCs and TGEs you were originally a part of have likely expanded beyond your wildest imaginations. So, therefore, has your potential customer base.”

  “Expanded or been destroyed!” shouted his chief heckler. “Civilizations fall on their own accord, without any help from us!”

  Oh, they got help all right, precisely from people like you, Sopos thought. But he let the point slide realizing it wasn’t in his best interests to make it right now. Instead he nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t deny the point my esteemed colleague from The Warus Galaxy is making. This is why the Shadow Warriors have promised to spread war wherever they go, on a multiverse level. And, of course, someone will have to supply the Gypsy Galaxy doing battle at a multiverse level. And who knows, with time, at a multiverse of multiverses level.”

  More gasps erupted from the chamber that not even the noise cancellation could entirely suppress.

  Again Sopos gestured assuagingly. “Of course, it goes without saying that the Gypsy Galaxy will need to travel from one location to another with other galaxies in tow, specializing in their own niches in such a cosmic scale war effort. Entire galaxies will be needed to supply armaments to conduct war at the multiverse level. Other galaxies will supply intelligence, humanoid engineering capabilities to contend with new habitats our warriors are being exposed to that no one could anticipate… Even with sales now climbing aggressively as the Gypsy Galaxy ramps up to work on a multiverse level, sooner or later, you will all need to specialize, when the market gets saturated. After all, after a while, we run out of multiverses.”

  There was actual laughter exploding throughout the chamber from various hotspots. Other delegates were clapping. This is a hell of a way to forge peace and consensus between squabbling galaxies, Sopos thought.

  Sopos continued unabated over the noise, “And what do we know about first-to-market advantages?”

  Another outburst of cheers. This time everyone was standing and clapping.

  Finally the crowd sat as one. All but the heckler. Not surprisingly. Of all the galaxies, The Warus Galaxy profited the most from war the way it was being fought today. They had inroads into all the other galaxies already, selling them arms as well. They had the most to lose of anybody if plans went awry. “How do you teleport a galaxy, far less a TGC? What about the real estate already there you plan to drop us on top of? Or do you mean to slip us into some void well away from the action?”

  “An excellent question from the honorable delegate from The Warus Galaxy. But I’m afraid the answer is simple. That celestial matter will be swapped out, dematerialized, if you will. Which ought to enhance our position at the bargaining table come time to show people what we can and can’t do for them. And the Shadow Warriors have the technology to put that celestial real estate back where it was, if need be.” Technically, it was Leon and his people who possessed this technology, not the Shadow Warriors, but Sopos saw no need to complicate already ticklish negotiations with these simpletons who were hardly known for parsing casuistries.

  The delegate from the Warus Galaxy looked to be boiling over more than ever, just keeping it to himself this time. No wonder. He was being informed minute by minute how they were already no longer at the cutting edge of intergalactic warfare. No one in the Warus Galaxy had any idea how to pull off magic like teleporting galaxies with their available tech and spy networks. And the delegate didn’t much like the idea of moving down the food chain. The other delegates seemed to be enjoying his squirming. Sopos could bet they enjoyed the idea of moving up the food chain even as the Warus Galaxy was moving down.

  “What’s your timeline for getting us free of The Collectors, and situated so we can expand our economies geometrically?” the Warus Galaxy heckler asked. The question was another thinly packaged bomb set to go off in Sopos’s face if he didn’t handle it just so.

  Sopos lied. He wanted to get a rise out of the room, to know just who was a hundred percent for this idea, or at least strongly leaning in its direction, and who was merely biding their time to see if they could still sabotage the prison break, because they were just a little too vested in the status quo to cede the game to the upstart powers. “Mere weeks,” Sopos said.

  “Impossible!” This time it wasn’t just the Warus Galaxy delegate shouting that. There were scores of them shouting it or something similar throughout the room, rising from their seats, and looking more outraged by the news than relieved.

  But others were dancing a jig. Their outbursts came in the form of exploding cheer.

  The hecklers, multiplying in number by the second, as those still on the fence, thinking things through, started rising from their seats, and from their secret communications to their “handlers” back in their home galaxies, their minds far more made up.

  “Proof that this is all just a pipedream!” shouted one.

  “No such timeline is vaguely possible!” said another.

  The noise cancellation technology was letting through the naysayers and suppressing the go-alongs, as Sopos had prearranged. He also wanted to know how swayable the go-a
longs were. He wanted them exposed to the full brunt of the rhetoric from the naysayers.

  His centurions, after all, were scanning everyone’s minds, and the communications going back and forth between the delegates and their handlers—the multi-quadrillionare oligarchs pulling their strings.

  As if he were conducting church, Sopos said, “Might I suggest we observe a moment of silence,” riding the rising din with the aid of the room AI’s noise cancellation technology, like a champion wave rider. “A time to confer with the other powers-that-be in our respective galaxies. The entire campus is available to you, where you can find private rooms, if you like, free of surveillance of any kind. We will reconvene back here in twelve hours. That should give everyone time enough to prepare their counterproposals, or to request still more time, if need be, before any final decisions are made.”

  There seemed to be general agreement throughout the room. “Then it’s settled,” Sopos said. “We’ll reconvene here in twelve hours.”

  The privacy dome slid up, exposing the city beyond, which wrapped around the entire planet. They were high up, situated at the hub of a space port. The spokes of that wheel extended in all directions, and along those spokes were parked the spaceships that the delegates had used to get here, and, of course, much smaller air taxis that could be used to ferry them to the rest of the campus.

  The campus, of course, was the planet itself, set aside for trans-galactic negotiations. Only delegates could come and go as they pleased from Scalazar. The only other parties that could tunnel through the barrier walls erected by The Collectors to keep everyone else trapped inside their respective galaxies were the ones spreading war between galaxies within the Menagerie on their behalf.