The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (20 page)

“Not so absurd, apparently.”

“Apparently,” he agrees dryly. He’s holding a lot
back. If he’s buying into this whole rewrite-the-future scenario
more than I am, I expect he did indeed have a meltdown when he saw
what he woke up to.

“So you were sent to be a spy in Chang’s ranks?” I
put together. “He brought more with him?”

“A few. A very bad few. And me, playing my part.
Unfortunately, as soon as I realized what he’d done, what he’d
pulled off, everyone he’d killed, everything he’d erased… I had a
fit. Lost it. Completely. Lashed out. Mangled a few of his fragile
minions. Fled. Only realized how bad I’d blown it after it was
done. Thankfully, he didn’t want me wandering loose. So after a
merry chase, I let him find me.”

“Would that have killed him?” I need to know.

“He’d have to be almost in the middle of it. But it
could do him enough damage to set him back a few years. In the mean
time, I might be able to take all of his resources. Then figure out
a way to contain him.”

“Why are we walking
away
?” I stop him
urgently. “Shouldn’t we be finishing him while we have the
chance?”

“He wasn’t close enough to the blast. And as long as
he has resources, he’d escape anything I managed. Plus, he has
those other friends of his cooking. Maybe done by now.”

“Bly?” I assume.

“No,” he corrects. “The Pirate King is just a toy.
Like his mangled lover, the one with no legs that likes
explosions.” He’s talking about Brimstone, Nina Harper. “A fraction
of what we are. Like a child’s science fair version. Makes for some
muscle. Show. To impress the mortal meat.”

“What about Astarte?” I ask.

“In place,” he tells me.

“She’s with Chang?” I need him to clearly
confirm.

“He thinks so. She’s playing much better than I did,
give her credit. But then, she’s always been a spy. Huh… You’d
think Chang would be a little suspicious. I guess she’s all they
say she is.”

“Which is?” I’m getting irritated by the walking
interrogation.

“She has a way with males. And some females. I’ve
heard it’s one of her Company mods, but I think it’s standard
equipment. No effect on me, of course. Not my type.”

“And you just blew her up?” I confront his earlier
concern.

“I doubt it. She knew what I was up to. She would
have been deep in the ship, aft. Safe. I expect the only reason she
hasn’t called is that Chang is still in one piece, probably venting
like a brat. Or the EM interference is still too hot. She was an
old friend of yours, wasn’t she?”

“Usually,” I give back some of his own vagueness. He
seems to appreciate it.

“Where were we? Ah, yes: Your brain damage.”

“Yod,” I focus him. “Who or what is a Yod?”

The question visibly amuses him.

“There’s this old Tibetan text of questionable
origin,” he circumlocutes. “It supposedly predates human
civilization. The gist of the tale is that a race of gods came to
Earth and created us, warning that we would in turn become gods and
create life ourselves, an endless cycle. Very poetic. But in this
tale, very bad things happen when some of the experimenters try to
create something they shouldn’t: something arguably
superior
to themselves.”

“And that’s Yod?”

“I really don’t know what Yod is. The idea was to
take what we were becoming out of the proverbial box: an ultimate
life form, interfaced and interactive with
everything
.
Omniscient omnipresent omnipotent. If we were like the gods of our
myths, this would be more like the Biblical version. It’s quite
funny, actually: God makes man. Man makes God. Proves just how
stupid we are as a species.”

“We made an all-powerful being?” I don’t buy.

“We created
something
,” he allows. “What,
exactly, is open to debate. New life? Something else? Close enough
to all-powerful. Closer than us. Call it a working scale
model.”

“And somebody thought this was a good idea?”

“Chalk it up to the ego of the invincible. Or the
daring of the exceptionally bored. I seem to remember you being
buddies with an omniscient omnipresent Artificial Intelligence.
That was certainly terrifying for its time. But was it
alive
? Yod is organic, self-replicating.”

“And that sounds terrifying, even by my standards,” I
admit uncomfortably (and more uncomfortably because I
should
remember this).

“Your AI was just plugged into our networks. Yod
could plug into
anything
. Matter itself. Maybe even energy.
He was showing us he could operate on a quantum level. This was
potential extinction.”

“Sounds like we’re on the wrong team.”

“You’d think. Actually, you did. So did I. Until we
met Him. I can’t describe it. I’m sorry. I’m
really
sorry
you can’t seem to remember—maybe the depth of the experience just
didn’t store in your regen code. But you’re
here
. You agreed
to this. Maybe it was because you trusted that other scary
omniscient omnipresent being all those years.”

We walk for awhile in silence.

“We were on the wrong path,” he continues idly. “You
wanted something better for us. So did I. We were doomed on the
path we were on. You and I and a few others believed Yod could be
better. Not the end, like Chang thought. Maybe a new
beginning.”

“So Yod sent us to stop Chang,” I feel the need to
confirm after another klick passes under our boots.

This also amuses him.

“Yod actually developed the technology to
time-splice, for observation only—a miracle of his capability.
Chang stole it, corrupted it. Yod couldn’t stop him in time, but he
could insert a few of us into the code. Astarte and I got into
Chang’s graces enough hitch a ride, cue Yod to when it was
happening.”

“Why not just sabotage the code?” I confront.

“He’d just try again, and we might not be spliced in.
It was a long shot anyway. I don’t even think Yod believed Chang
would succeed. I mean: this isn’t really you and me—you know that,
right? We’re more like copies, backups. It’s really quite
unnerving, when you think about it. The whole crazy plan was
just-in-case.”

“But we
failed
,” I have to remind him. “Chang
sent simple machines, drones that replicated long before we did.
Your ‘superior being’ didn’t know that?”

He looks down at the dirt, chews his thin lips,
looks… guilty?

“My fault. I didn’t get that information in time. The
drones were Chang’s last-minute flash of sick brilliance, a
fall-back assuming something as complex as us didn’t cross over.
The code was already set—it was massive. No time for an update. I
guess Yod decided to send us anyway.”

“Bad move.”

“Remains to be seen. Maybe He picked right. He does
think and exist on a whole different level than we do—or at least
He
did
, since He’s as gone as the rest of our world. Maybe
this
was
His backup plan. Maybe we’re the ones to get things
back on track. Maybe better, this time.”

“Benevolent deities?” I muse.

He gets a good chuckle out of that.

I spend the drag of the long hike trying to plumb my
memories. I still have nothing at all on this thing called Yod that
supposedly made all of this—the atrocity
and
the potential
save—happen. I certainly don’t remember signing up for some kind of
time-traveling Super Friends adventure with Star and this Bel
character to save the world. (But it is exactly the kind of stupid
shit I’d agree to.)

So I drag my second memories for Bel.

“Belial” is old Hebrew, badly translated as anything
from “worthless” to “unsalvageable” to “without virtue,” a
catch-all term for evil scum. (“Bel” just means “lord”.) The name
became associated with a fallen angel (and not the first of them—a
straggler). Then a lord of the fallen.

I seem to know him as what he sort of said he was: A
critic. A scientist, moralist. Someone I remember appreciating,
even if I didn’t fully agree with him. A fellow pain in the ass.
Brilliant. Witty. Full of himself. Showy as hell. Pretty much the
guy I’m walking with.

But I don’t remember being friends or compatriots, or
even ever meeting him before this. I knew
of
him. That was
it.

And he went by another name, a nom-de-guerre, at
least when he was “working”.

The Enemy.

(In Hebrew, that would be Satan.)

“So you built a nuclear bomb?” I restart the
conversation when we start to lose momentum, climbing up and down
the ridges that radiate from the Catena Divide. Bel has been
marveling at almost every piece of green we pass. He apparently
hasn’t been farther east than the Tyr ruin, so he hasn’t seen the
deep green jungles that the ETE insist are out there.

“It was a pretty simple mechanism,” he discounts. “I
used the fusion core from my Trident—a variation on the Staff
popular in our world, a bigger version of the Wand.”

It jogs my memory enough to remember the gadgets:
Similar to the ETE “tools”, capable of generating energy fields,
manipulating matter. Mostly toys used for idle destruction, or a
lazy extension of bodily mods. A few of us found more artistic
applications.

“So: No, I can’t make you another one,” he
anticipates, “not without fissionable material.”

I spend quite a few klicks catching him up on what’s
happened in this supposedly altered timeline: The Discs, the
Apocalypse, what I woke up to after fifty years in Hiber Sleep, the
peoples I’ve met. The friends I’ve lost. Chang. The atrocities he’s
done since he’s decided to go to war. My stupid death. The fatally
dumb things I’ve done since Star “saved” me and made me into this.
Ending with the Tranquility situation—what we’re headed back
to.

(I feel guilty for leaving them, no matter what the
reason. Fera dead. Everyone else probably beyond terrified. Their
one “savior” run off into the desert.)

(And what the hell happened to Palmer? Did he get
away? Did someone feed his meat to the gardens? Or has he stirred
up more violence?)

Bel, it turns out, hasn’t been “here” long. He
regained consciousness only several days ago (maybe Chang decided
he needed backup after he saw “Ra” flying to my rescue). He didn’t
stick around long enough to see what all Chang had managed. He ran.
Ran some more. Stumbled across a buried reactor in a stripped ruin
I identify as Arcadia. Then decided to set his little trap, using
the nuclear material to supplement what was in his toy. I’m trying
to imagine him building a functioning warhead with his bare hands
like I fixed a few pieces of survival gear.

It’s nightfall when we get back to Tranquility.

Bel marvels at the dome, all the rich green life.

It’s Two Gun that greets us at the main gate,
initially at guns-point, then lowering them when he sees me. Murphy
is behind him. His shoulder is bandaged under his shredded sleeve.
He’s still got dried blood and dust on his face.

“You almost missed the funeral,” Two Gun grumbles at
me, then looks at Bel.

“Another friend,” I tell him.

“Like you?” he guesses. He doesn’t sound happy about
it, confirms it when I nod. “More death?”

He turns and goes back inside, ignoring us. Murphy
gestures with his head for us to follow.

I put off the obvious questions when I see the
lanterns. And then a few hundred Cast, daring the H-K, gathered in
the night up in one of the garden terraces.

We follow Murphy. Climb.

There’s a fresh dug grave in one of the garden beds,
marked with a seedling of blood strawberry—Fera’s favorite, Mak
tells me quietly. She tells me she is grateful that I returned her
friend’s affection, let her have someone she could love and respect
and care for, even if it was only one day. But then, the Cast don’t
live by numbers.

She also tells me that the Cast dead aren’t stripped,
butchered and processed. They get buried whole, in a place of
honor, their remains feeding a special plant or garden patch—a
living memorial, tended for all time, giving back to her
people.

Bel and Murphy stay with me as the Cast all file
past, some stopping to plant additional shoots on the mound. Only a
few look at me. Two Gun is nowhere in sight.

“I’ve forgotten what this was like,” Bel confesses
near the end of the ceremony, clearly moved.

“Let’s not make a habit of it,” I grumble.

“What happened to Palmer?” I ask Murphy after the
Cast have headed indoors.

“Fought his way back to a hatch while most were
focused on that thing in the sky. He’s lucky he was wearing the
armor. But that ship proves what you were trying to tell us. I
expect they’re pretty shaken up inside.”

“You think they’ll go forward with the plan to blow
this dome, burn the gardens?”

“If they think it’ll keep Chang from coming back.
Palmer will probably volunteer to plant the charges himself, just
to get another shot at restoring his Score.”

I have Murphy and Bel follow me up to Fera’s home,
figuring it’s currently unoccupied. Both of them lose themselves
for awhile in the remnants of her life, Bel mourning someone he
didn’t know and Murphy steadily coming to accept the Cast as fellow
humans.

“Huh…” Murphy’s found a carved wooden box—a precious
treasure from Earth, and heirloom of generations past. Opening it,
he finds a necklace and bracelets, intricately woven out of fine
wire, with artistic inclusions of old circuit boards and shell
casings. I can see there’s old dried blood still stuck in the wire
weave—memento of mourning, or a trophy? Then he pulls something
different out of the box: It’s a remote micro-cam, a common
supplement to operational Link gear. He turns it in his fingers,
looks like he’s reading its markings. He freezes for an instant—I
watch his eyes go wide—then drops the piece back in the box and
closes it, puts it back where he found it without a word, acting as
if trying to pretend he’s found nothing of interest.