Messiah Page 5

  Flynn only had the one.

  But that one mind, his ancestor, had been one of the founders of the colony, a woman named Kari Tetsami. And Tetsami had been a native of Bakunin.

  Unlike the other people from Salmagundi, Flynn seemed to have a separate existence from the other mind he hosted. Nickolai sensed a change in his body language when the woman Tetsami spoke. It extended to his voice and his facial expression, and even his smell. Tetsami was less reserved, and more confident.

  Parvi asked him, “You know why the PSDC has just gone insane?”

  Flynn/Tetsami nodded. “Blame our mutual acquaintance, Tjaele Mosasa.”

  Parvi narrowed her eyes and asked, “What the hell does Mosasa have to do with this?”

  “What was he designed to do?” Tetsami asked.

  “What does that . . .” Parvi stopped, staring at Flynn. After a moment she said, “Oh, shit. Of course. That selfish mechanical bastard.”

  Dörner spoke up. “Do you mind explaining what you two are talking about?”

  “Bakunin isn’t stable,” Tetsami said. “It never was.”

  “What do you mean?” Dörner asked.

  “She means that damned AI Mosasa was manipulating the whole planet.” Parvi put her face in her hand. “He—it—wanted a Stateless world, so he was using the social engineering skills the Race programmed into him to keep the whole jury-rigged apparatus from caving in on itself. Then he leaves to let the whole thing fall apart without him. And I worked for that thing.”

  Ingrid looked from Parvi to Flynn and asked, “Who is Tjaele Mosasa?”

  “He’s the reason . . .” Parvi shook her head. “Someone else explain. I’m not up to it.”

  “Mosasa was evil,” Nickolai said quietly. Kugara looked as if she was about to say something critical, but he continued. “He was evil not because he was a machine, an intellect born of dead matter. He was evil because he played God. He was evil because he was a very small reflection of the being that destroyed Salmagundi and Khamsin . . .”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Reincarnation

  “The faster one runs from the past, the sooner one revisits it.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “History is the most cruel of all Goddesses.”

  —FRIEDRICH ENGELS

  (1820-1895)

  Date: 2526.8.3 (Standard) Earth Orbit-Sol

  Rebecca had returned to the Prophet’s Voice, and Adam’s host. Her embodied form stood in a cabin that was both archaic and comforting. There was no need for the artificial gravity, or the cot, or even the oxygen atmosphere. But even though this room had been a prison to her when Adam had come, she kept returning to it; as if it was an essential link back to her own humanity.

  She knew that, when Adam finally remade this, as he had the surface of the world below them, she would find the loss hard to bear.

  I’ve already lost, she thought. We all have.

  She sat down on the cot and closed her eyes. She directed her attention inside herself, into the fuzzy boundaries of a mind that refused now to be contained in a biological vessel. The vastness she found within herself was a gift, one common to all of Adam’s chosen. But unlike the others their self-appointed savior had lifted beyond the flesh, she knew she had yet to fully comprehend what she had become.

  But inside her own consciousness there were universes beyond Adam’s reach or knowledge.

  She focused on one such universe. Around her coalesced a war-scarred plain dominated by a rolling mushroom cloud. Wreckage and bodies lay scattered across the muddy ground around her, steam still coiling from some.

  She looked upon a memory, but one that did not belong to her.

  A man stood alone, next to the twisted remains of an aircar, staring into the cloud.

  “Jonah Dacham?” she said.

  He turned around and looked at her. “You know me?”

  “More important is that Adam knows you.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “I can keep you hidden here. It’s safe.”

  He turned to face the mushroom cloud and shook his head. “Safe?”

  “It’s only a memory.”

  Dacham snorted. “Only the memory of a genocide, the Confederacy’s penultimate act of self-destruction. Do you even understand what this is?”

  “That was the Protean city on Bakunin,” Rebecca answered. Then she pointed to a fresh pile of wreckage. “And that was your aircar.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Rebecca Tsoravitch, at least that’s who I was.”

  “How is it you know this? Or know me?”

  A familiar voice came from behind them, “You both have a mutual friend.”

  They turned to see Mosasa sitting on the still smoldering engine housing of a dead PSDC fighter.

  “You?” Dacham snapped.

  “Me,” Mosasa said. He smiled. “Though I think we are not talking about exactly the same things. The Mosasa you knew met an unfortunate end at his brother’s hands just about two months ago.”

  “Then who, or what, are you?”

  Mosasa slid off the engine housing and walked up to them. “I’m as close to the original as you’re going to get. A small attempt at immortality.” He placed a pair of fingers on Dacham’s chest. “Which makes me wonder at your own.”

  Dacham took a step back.

  Mosasa lowered his hand. “Why are you here, Dom?”

  “I was brought to this place.”

  “You know what I am asking,” Mosasa said. “How is it you are alive, on Earth, to receive Adam’s benediction? More intact than you were the last time we met?”

  Dacham said nothing.

  “Should I assume the Proteans had something to do with it? Their doomed attack on Adam’s fleet was merely a feint. If you’re part of a real attack, you’re an unfortunately poor choice.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know who Adam is?”

  The battlefield faded from around them, replaced by a stark white windowless office. An old man had fallen face first into an ornate desk, the back half of his head an ugly crater. A muscular man—who wasn’t quite a man—stood over the body, staring at it with eyes that were midnight black. Smoke still curled from the barrel of the heavy slugthrower clutched in his hand.

  Rebecca recognized the man with the gun. She had seen this creature in another memory Mosasa had shown her; she had seen him digging through the ruins of the Race homeworld, pulling AI cores out of the rubble with gangrenous hands. This golem of flesh and bone and heretical technology had been named Ambrose, and had buried within him one of Mosasa’s five AIs. The AI that would become Adam.

  Ambrose’s expression was almost completely blank, as if he couldn’t quite understand what he had done. But as Rebecca watched, she could see some measure of emotion leak through the dead impassive face. An almost imperceptible turn of the mouth, a slight narrowing of the eyes. Something buried inside this husk enjoyed what it had just done.

  She knew who the dead man was; it was Dimitri Olmanov, the most powerful man in the Confederacy. If the destruction of the Protean commune had been the “Confederacy’s penultimate act of self-destruction,” this was the fatal wound. Ambrose carried an AI that bore the Race’s imperative to destroy the Confederacy they had warred with—and though the war was long over, Ambrose’s hand had been the one to see that mission completed.

  Perhaps that was why it was Ambrose who so fatally snapped when Mosasa’s AIs returned to the Race homeworld to find their creators had extinguished themselves.

  “Who Adam is?” Dacham repeated. He stared at the tableau focusing on the dead man on the desk, whispering, “Dimitri?”

  Mosasa laughed. “No, Dom, unlike you, Dimitri is quite permanently dead.”

  Ambrose looked up from his work, directing those almost-empty black eyes toward them. Something in those eyes made Rebecca reassess exactly when this fragment of Mosasa’s AI had lost its sanity. She had thought its mind had fractured when it had disc
overed that its creators had destroyed themselves . . .

  But this Ambrose already seemed well along on the path toward madness.

  Dacham stared at the creature—as human as it looked, she could no longer think of it as a man—as it passed by them, leaving the corpse alone in the office with them.

  “Him? Ambrose?”

  “See, you have met.”

  Dacham shook his head.

  “And should you come under Adam’s scrutiny, the same questions will arise in his mind as do in mine.”

  Dacham shook his head and glared at Mosasa’s image. Around them, the office crumbled away in favor of a desert landscape defined by ranks of hundreds of dead and disabled aircraft. “Why should I trust you?”

  Mosasa chuckled. “Because you still exist.”

  “Why are you here?” Rebecca asked him. “Why did you volunteer to be Adam’s chosen?”

  Dacham shook his head and said, “How can I know that my continued existence is not just because Adam wants that information?”

  Mosasa looked across at Rebecca and said, “It seems to be an impasse, then.”

  The three of them stood silent for a moment, until the wind carried a voice through the hot desert air.

  “Stop it! Stop pretending to be human!”

  A look of shock crossed Dacham’s face as he turned to find the source of the voice. “What is this?”

  “Only another memory,” Mosasa said.

  Dacham ran off, in the direction of the shouting.

  “What the hell?” Rebecca said. “Where are we?”

  “You never visited our home on Bakunin?”

  She shook her head. In all her dealings with the AI Mosasa, she had never actually set foot on the planet. “Where is he going?”

  “Shall we see?” Mosasa walked after Dacham, and Rebecca followed.

  They walked through the maze of dead aircraft, across black sand packed as hard as asphalt. The air was dry and hot as an oven.

  They caught up with Dacham at the edge of a clearing before an oversized hangar. He stood, watching a trio of figures facing off in front of the open hangar door.

  Rebecca knew the two men by the hangar. One was Ambrose, bald and black-eyed, with an expression that still spoke madness to her. The other was the AI Mosasa, physically identical in appearance to the figure that stood next to her. Oddly, though, something in the AI now rang false to her: the movement, body language, all seemed less alive than even Ambrose.

  Facing the two AIs stood an Asian woman in a leather jacket. She held up a small remote control as if she were threatening them with it. On the ground in front of her was a black case.

  The AI Mosasa took a step and said, “Tetsami—”

  The woman screamed at him, “Don’t you fucking move! You haven’t earned the right. You never told me you were an effing AI.”

  Rebecca turned to her Mosasa and asked, “What’s going on here?”

  “A bit of hubris,” he told her. “My AIs, all of them, could see vast societal processes, manipulate events with a grand precision. Adam himself is the epitome of this. But that view of the universe breeds a fatal flaw, the assumption that individuals are as malleable, or easy to predict. Individuals have free will, societies don’t.”

  “Who is that woman?”

  “A common acquaintance of myself and Mr. Dacham. Please, though, watch the drama.”

  She looked back at Tetsami and the two AIs. The AI Mosasa almost looked pained as he talked, but she could read the falseness in his voice. “We do not control people. We only anticipate their voluntary actions. Everyone chose his or her own path, Dominic and Ivor included.”

  The woman, Tetsami, trembled, her voice carrying an edge of hysteria in it. “You set this Christ-blown bullshit up in the first place, you electronic hypocrite!”

  Mosasa’s voice was inhumanly calm. “As much as anyone on this planet, we have been trying to maintain Bakunin as a viable political entity. All that differs is our methods. If you must blame someone for these deaths, don’t the two of them share some complicity?”

  “Whose deaths?” Rebecca whispered.

  “Shh, just listen.”

  The AI Mosasa said, “Dominic Magnus chose his own death twice.”

  “What?” Tetsami looked up.

  What? Rebecca thought. The name cut through her suddenly, and she turned to look at Dacham. His face had gone white, and his hand went up to his face.

  Dominic Magnus.

  Bequeathed to her along with the memory of this man Dacham was the memory of his aliases, the names he had used on Bakunin. Primary among those was the name Dominic Magnus.

  The AI continued speaking to Tetsami, “Dominic Magnus flew into the wrong end of a wormhole. It was the only way he could see in which at least a version of himself could make it to the Terran Congress in time.”

  Tetsami stared and whispered something that was inaudible to Rebecca. She didn’t need to hear what Tetsami said. Rebecca could see the meaning of it in her face; the same sense of loss she saw in Dacham’s.

  The robotic Mosasa kept talking, and to Rebecca, the words felt like knives attacking whatever rationale had brought this woman here; be it love, grief, or anger . . .

  “The Dominic who died at GA&A was a ghost. He wasn’t the Dom you knew. That version of Dominic spent nine years in isolation, waiting for the Congress, and came from a universe different from ours in a few important respects.”

  “Different? How?” Tetsami sounded hollow, beaten.

  “For one example, you died before this Jonah Dacham left Bakunin.”

  “But I . . .” Her words trailed off, swallowed by the silence in the surrounding desert.

  Rebecca heard Dacham whisper, “You did die.”

  “Your Dominic didn’t die at GA&A. He died when he crossed the event horizon of a wormhole in the 61 Cygni system.”

  Tetsami shook her head and brandished the remote control in her hand. The resignation in her voice was frightening. “I should set this off on general principles. Just for you playing God with all of us.”

  “Everyone tries to play God,” the AI responded. “It’s just that some are better at it than others.”

  If the tone in her voice was frightening, the grin that suddenly crossed her face was even more so. “You arrogant SOB. You know the real reason I ain’t blowing us all into orbit?” The AIs didn’t respond immediately, and Tetsami’s voice rose almost an octave, near hysteria. “Come on, you and you predictive psychology should be able to figure that one out.”

  The AI Mosasa finally responded, and in his voice Rebecca could sense a tentative fear. “You’ve decided that it isn’t worth it to take your own life for the sake of revenge?”

  He doesn’t know, Rebecca thought, and that frightens him.

  Tetsami laughed. “Not even close.” She walked up and picked up the case that was lying on the ground between her and the AIs. “The reason we’re not a smoking crater is because this happens to be my luggage. And this,” she held out the hand with the remote, “is my hotel key.”

  Tetsami turned and walked away.

  Dacham watched the memory of Tetsami leave and asked, “She lived?”

  “Through this version of events,” said Rebecca’s Mosasa.

  Dacham shook his head, “Why bother showing me this?”

  “It is relevant to your cooperation with us,” Mosasa said as the spaceship graveyard dissolved around them, leaving them inside a vast cathedral-like space.

  “How?”

  Mosasa shocked Rebecca by saying, “Because your one-time lover still lives, at least in the same sense I do.”

  Dacham just gaped at him. Rebecca glanced around the building Mosasa had brought them to, and as she recognized the place, she began to understand.

  Mosasa spread his arms in a grand gesture and said, “Welcome to the Hall of Minds.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Denominations

  “If you leave an enemy alive, you better leave him something to
live for.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Diplomacy is simply war by another name.”

  —SYLVIA HARPER

  (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.8.4 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The Wisconsin was one of hundreds of self-contained orbital habitats clustering around Bakunin, outside the free-fire zone the PSDC had established from geosynchronous orbit on down. It orbited Schwitzguebel, Bakunin’s larger moon. It was one of the many places that Toni had contacted when the Daedalus tached in to this nightmare over a month ago. Back then, as the system was just being overwhelmed with refugee craft, they had denied docking privileges.

  Things had changed.

  The Wisconsin hovered in the display before her, a massive construct larger than the 3SEC Command Platform orbiting Styx. The heart of it was a prism defined by three two-kilometer-long parallel tubes, their cross-sections arranged to center on the vertices of an equilateral triangle. The tubes were connected by a complex network of scaffolding that kept the enclosed tubes fixed relative to each other and spinning around a common axis through the center of its triangular cross-section. As it turned, Toni saw sunlight glitter off of hectares of windows, all pointed toward the center of rotation. Surrounding it, thousands of mirrors directed sunlight in toward the three linked habitats, giving the whole the appearance of a slowly rotating cylinder made of pipes and broken glass.

  She had never seen anything like it.

  The habitats she had known, that she had served on, had all been solid, gray, functional. This was like a fairy castle hovering over the daylight side of Schwitzguebel.

  She talked to traffic control on the Wisconsin as they directed her on the proper approach path, and even as she monitored the controls, her bearing, and the thrust of the engines, her eyes still kept drifting up to the main display.