The Soul Consortium (20 page)

“But how?”

“Watch.” Kayne spreads his arms, then claps, and the darkness returns. In the distance, the pinpoint of light returns, and with the twitch of a finger it expands but not as dramatically as before. This time it is a familiar image known through elementary physics lessons: a series of demi-praxons jiggling about each other to form a triad of quarks. He expands it further, and I see an electron, then an atom and finally a hydrogen molecule.

“The mathematics is simple enough now. We can predict the path of each particle and therefore predict which molecules are formed and how they react with each other. The Codex is the pathway of calculation from the very first spark—the Promethean Singularity.” He smiles. “The ancients from Old Earth used to call it the big bang.”

“How are you able to predict the future from the Codex?”

“It isn’t easy, but classical reductionism shows us that from the first spark and the application of fundamental universal law and the equations within the Codex, we should be able to trace every event all the way until its conclusion. Obviously we’re dealing with an almost infinite quantity of data, so for the human being it’s simpler to use a form of pattern recognition. Do you recognize the pattern before you now?”

“It’s a hydrogen atom.”

“And this?” Kayne ripples his fingers, and the pattern changes.

“Carbon.”

“And now this?”

The image blurs and changes, but this time the combination of molecules is so complex I have no clue, and I shake my head.

“Perhaps you would understand it better this way …”

The pattern blurs again before reforming into a familiar image of a human cerebellum.

“Yes, I see it now.”

“As I said, it’s all a matter of pattern recognition. Over the centuries we have refined our search parameters to hunt through the Codex to find certain patterns of mathematics. Individual molecules are easy to see but tell us almost nothing because they are everywhere. Obviously, finding the pattern of a human brain shows us a human being, but we have honed our science to such a degree that some of us have learned to recognize emotional patterns within a mind, the wave pattern of gamma rays from an exploding neutron star, even a word or sound.”

“Amazing.”

“Decades of intense study, discipline, and perhaps a little luck. Of course, all of us have become specialists in different areas of pattern recognition. I have learned to see disaster—there are certain repeated patterns of grief, ecological shock waves within the patterns, shifts in energies that help me recognize certain cataclysms. It is my job to seek these out so people can be warned in advance.”

“Can you tell me what the others specialize in? You mentioned Sunny. What does he see in the Codex?”

“Sunny is a remarkable case. He—”

“Sunny say! Not Kayne. Not Kayne.” The loud voice comes from behind us, and we both turn. Sunny enters the room, hunched over, looking at us with his bulging, frightened eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Kayne relinquishes control over the Codex, and the room dissolves back into its original setting of sandy walls and heavy wooden furnishings.

“Sunny came to see Soome. Tell Soome about what he sees.”

“And what have you seen?” I ask. “Is it the murders?”

“Sunny sees Keitus Vieta.”

“The abbot? The … other place?”

Sunny looks at me with such intensity it seems he is trying to tell me everything in a single expression of desperation. “We must stop him. But cannot stop him. Someone else must stop him.”

“Stop whom? The murderer? Keitus Vieta?”

“Keitus Vieta. M … must stop him.” Sunny moves closer to me, his fingers clasped tightly together, stumbling over his words to get his message across. “H-he … hurts the Codex.”

“Slow down. How can the abbot hurt the Codex?”

“Perhaps you should explain your gift to Brother Soome, Sunny,” says Kayne. “It may help him understand.”

“Yes, show you.” Sunny heads to the door, beckoning us to follow.

I oblige, and followed by Brother Kayne, we move quickly along the passage, around several corners, and through a number of heavy doors before reaching Sunny’s chamber. It looks much the same as the others but with a magnificent exception: the walls are covered with portraits and canvases, all with beautifully crafted designs. Some are half-finished, some in pastel shades, some in oils.

“They’re amazing. Where did you learn—?”

“This. Look this.” He stabs a dirty finger at the painting he is currently working on and then stares at me hopefully. “You find.”

I shiver when I see what Sunny has painted. It’s a room, probably one somewhere inside the monastery, dark and hard to make out at first, but then I see an arm, a gaping face, a half-rotted leg amongst the gray and red patterns: the room is filled with naked cadavers.

“You want me to find this room?” I ask him.

“I think,” says Kayne, “Sunny is saying that you
will
find this room.”

Cold, I look at them both.

Sunny is nodding vigorously.

“You saw this in the Codex?”

Sunny continues to nod.

“Some gift!” I stare at the bodies in his picture, and the stench of death infecting the atmosphere of the monastery comes back to me again.

“Sunny hasn’t told you what his gift is yet.” Kayne turns to the excited monk. “Will you explain?”

Sunny screws up his face, as if frustrated, then ambles over to a collection of discarded drawings stacked in the corner by his bed. He flicks through them, then pulls one out, hands it to me. It’s a white background splashed with a series of black dots and lines.

I study it, and just as I’m about to tell them I see nothing there, a recognizable form leaps from the canvas—gothic spires, gargoyles, and turrets. “It’s the monastery.”

“Yes,” says Kayne, “but it took you a moment to see it, didn’t it?”

“Because of the way it’s been drawn.”

“Look closer and understand why.”

It takes me another few seconds, and then I see it—the shape of the monastery is made from the white of the canvas rather than the few black markings Sunny has spread over it.

Kayne smiles. “Sunny does not see the patterns created by the Codex. He sees the subtle negatives; he sees the aberrations: the differences between what the Codex predicts and what we, in reality, are actually seeing and experiencing.”

“Keitus Vieta!” says Sunny, and starts rummaging through his sketches again.

I stare at the drawing. “But … that means the Codex is wrong.”

“A paradox, wouldn’t you say? The Codex is never wrong.”

“But it must be. If the predictions are different from what actually happens, it must be wrong.”

“Not so. The Codex has replicated history exactly with its data for billions of years. It has never been different, never been inaccurate, which is why its open revelation to the masses caused such terrible chaos. But now we
are
seeing a divergence, and Sunny here started to see it.” Kayne raises his chin a little. “Would you care to guess what else coincided with the divergence and Sunny’s gift?”

“Illuminate me.” But I already know what he’s going to say.

“It all started when things changed in the monastery, specifically, when Abbot Deepseed began to notice the oppression around us, as if we are being …” Kayne twirls his hands. “For want of a more accurate description, haunted. Not that any of us believe in specters, you understand.

“Fortunately for us, Sunny’s gift enables us to still make predictions—he can see specifics in the Codex and by, shall we say, ‘subtracting’ what he sees in reality, the remainder is the aberration.”

“Keitus Vieta,” Sunny repeats and pulls out another picture. “Very important. Remember.” He stabs a knuckle hard into my chest as I take it from him. “You remember,” he insists loudly. “The Watcher must remember. Always remember. Save us.”

This time there is no optical illusion in its design, but the meaning of the picture is still cryptic. At the center of the canvas is a silhouette—the profile of a man with arms and legs outstretched, surrounded by a bubble. A line, like a spear, has pierced the man’s heart, plunged through to the other side of his torso, then penetrated the wall of the bubble. A glowing, cratered ball—possibly a moon—rests on the tip of the spear outside the bubble, and where the skin of the bubble has been broken, a whirlpool has formed, sucking matter inside.

“This is important?” I ask Sunny.

He’s nodding frantically, pointing at the picture. “Keitus Vieta. You. Must. Remember.”

I look back at Kayne. “What does he mean? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do we, but Sunny insists that this picture was specifically drawn for the Watcher.”

“And who is the Watcher?”

“We don’t know, but Sunny says this part of his prediction is for a far distant future, so none of it means much to us. Why he is so insistent on showing it to you is yet another mystery.”

“Does he think I’m the Watcher?”

“No,” says Kayne.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told us the Watcher’s name, and it isn’t yours. It’s someone called Salem Ben.”

I
t’s cold in my room and I lie on my bed, cushioning the back of my head with my palms, watching sand drift in the ruddy afternoon light through the window. I miss the warm sunlight of my home. But not just that, I miss everything. I miss the comforts, the security, my family, and I miss fresh air.

The stench of death finds me again, a reminder of the picture Sunny painted. He told me I would find that place. But where should I look? And what will I do when I find it? Who are they, and how did they get there? I should have these answers by now. But I don’t. The thought of that grisly discovery distracts me from rational thought. And what I think should be a simple answer eludes me.

I sit up straight, drawing in, then expelling a decisive breath. What I have to do now is what I have always done when the answers evade me: list the ten main things swimming around in my head. And I must not permit myself the luxury of emotional distraction or any conjecture until the list is complete. It has served me well enough in the past.

I pull out a data pad from the shelf next to my bed and begin my list.

1.
Keitus
Vieta or Abbot Deepseed? Which is he? Whoever he is, the resurrection is bogus, and perhaps this is the crux of the matter. He told the others he died, then came back to life in the same body, which was miraculously rejuvenated, but he has provided no explanation. (And nobody has the courage to press the matter.) Naturally, this new abbot is under the impression that the real abbot’s body has already been destroyed (as is their custom), but Makeswift showed me the corpse when I arrived. The logical explanation is that the genoplant is still operational, but that does not explain his change in personality; there is no doubt the others think of him as a different man.

2.
Vieta
is most likely not a clone from the genoplant. On my second day here I visited the generators to check Makeswift’s assertion that the power to the genoplant has been severed, and though I have limited knowledge of the technology, the lines have definitely been cut long ago.

3.
Is
it a coincidence that the murders began after the abbot’s alleged resurrection? It’s when everything changed for them, but even before Deepseed’s death, they noted a presence in the monastery.

4.
Watching
for signs of secrecy within the order is important. The murderer has a pattern. Each of the victims loses a personal possession before he is murdered, so the culprit will be hiding these items. As part of his pattern, the murderer also brands his victims with the Eye of Pandora after they have died.

5.
You
cannot sense what the senses deny. It’s a phrase I heard long ago, but I never understood what it meant until today. A smell of death pervades the entire monastery, yet the monks seem not to notice it. Whether it is denial as the motto suggests, I don’t know, but wherever the stench is coming from, I feel certain it is the same hellish place Sunny captured on canvas. And according to him, I am going to be the one who finds it.

6.
Through
years of experience I have developed an instinct for finding the right evidence to solve most mysteries. And it is purely on instinct that I am considering Sunny’s other painting now, because it seems to have no relevance to this case, yet he insists I must remember it. It depicts a man inside a bubble with a spear running right through him. The spear continues on through the skin of the bubble where it produces a whirlpool, and on the outside, on the tip of the spear, is a moon. Sunny wanted me to see it, but it was intended for someone called the Watcher.

7.
These
monks have never heard of the Watcher, but Sunny knows his name to be Salem Ben. Who is he? Does he have a connection to the murders and the abbot?

8.
Words
spoken in haste can often reveal a person’s true intent, but they are not as revealing as the subtle signs made during eye contact. It is of course a misconception that avoiding eye contact during an interview reveals deceit, but it is a misconception of which I believe Brother Tennison Redwater—the gardener—is unaware; he did not look away from me the whole time I interviewed him. It’s a sure sign he was determined to convince me of his honesty. Why? I don’t believe he is the murderer, but he knows something. I saw fearful secrets in his eyes. But are those secrets relevant to this case?

9.
Even
if Brother Kayne is not permitted to fully embrace technology, he is passionate about it and not ashamed to challenge the order’s abstinence from it. Kayne is a strong example of the contradictions between the order’s ideology and their practical needs. And this highlights the issue with the gardens. The monks shouldn’t be able to grow anything on this planet without technological aid, but evidently they do. I should speak to Tennison about it. Perhaps it will also give me more insight into whatever he’s hiding.

10.
Now
I come to the evidence I find most disturbing and least able to grasp or define: aside from the obvious issues with his resurrection and altered personality, there is something fundamentally wrong with the abbot.