Transcendence (91 page)

Herrschaft’s withered body dumps onto the floor of his burial chamber. Paolo’s face grants Nadir one last smile. A bitter, insane old man lies like a heap of bones in a bodybag he stitched around himself. Tens of thousands of soldiers cry out from the desert and the Pentagon and the ruined remains of Feedcontrol Central to their impromptu Boss, throwing away their most precious possession for an abstraction: Vengeance!

*I’m a black hole*—and he is, a great lightless whorl at the center of the galaxy. Long streamers of dark matter peel away from our minds as it sucks us clean of lingering resentments and festering sores of hate; Clarisse’s cluster of memories shines like a lumniglobe, lucid and as clear as a crystal. Jonathan thrashes back toward intheflesh existence as great clouds gush out of his mind; the wall of his physical body rises up around him, and no more hate falls from him onto the black hole.

Nadir’s accretion disk grows. When it has spread as wide as the Milky Way, it flashes like a Seyfert galaxy. The shockwave carries the words of a song, and Nadir’s orchestra consumes the roar of the explosion:

“
I’m alive

Burned alive

In the setting sun.

I am ev’ryone.

I’m free.

Silence. In the afterimages and shock-sounds of the supernova, we catch a note of sadness like a pebble falling into a body of water: *I failed,* says Pehr.

None of us can think of anything to say. Instead, we spend a moment in grief for the countless tiny losses in our lives—

As we grow older and identify who we are and what we want, the wish to go back with that wisdom and set the past right grows as well.
This is the drive for children
.

“
Let’s get on with our work. For the children.”

We continue to reach out along the human map of our solar system for key players in the war. Already we have found many more who joined willingly
. . .
or not as willingly. Nadir haunts us—a warning.

EConautics Fleet Boss, H.C., shut down his flagship’s drive rockets and fired the directionals. Solsystem lay like a disc beneath the
Locust
, invisible save for a few stars he knew were planets. The Earth-Moon system, however, looked like a pair of marbles—one blue, one white, tiny.

“
About to be crushed in the gears of my machine,” H.C. said.

Now
Locust
had rotated to face Earth. He ordered the main drive to roar back to life, and had to scamper back into his webbed harness. One of his twisted legs hung before his face. The tiny man hidden within his left foot whimpered with fear and ecstasy, remembering the freaks who had boarded
Locust
.

“
Somewhere down there, Toe,” he said to his invisible companion, “down, down there.” He upped forward pov magnification so it appeared his flagship was accelerating toward that world even though she was still trying to cancel out previous velocity. Earth grew drastically larger, but grainy.

“
Down there!” he said. A tremor quivered through his body as he thought of the man and woman who had boarded his ship, boarded it! He wasn’t ashamed that Toe might notice the physical manifestation of his disgust, since the huge atomic rockets were sending sympathetic vibrations through the hull.

The freaks had told H.C. that they weren’t just 3VRDs. And every one of his onboard instruments had proved them true. How had they done it? Teleportation, they said.

Psychics! “Freaks!” His contorted body twisted within the harness as nausea waved through his body in the same way vibrations were pulsing through the
Locust
. When they died down, he had regained his calm. Once again, H.C. was the man whom Director Herrschaft had personally assisted in gaining the rank of Fleet Boss.

Pride flushed through him. It was time to show his Director that H.C. was not one to let someone down.

H.C. added an overlay onto the splice of an Earth which trembled under the high magnification. Deep in the bowels of the
Locust
, one of EConautics’ largest yet swiftest destroyers, a pov camera showed 38 long shafts of titanium and plastic, wrapped with coils of tubing. The room echoed with the sound of frozen machinery breaking loose as each of the missiles extended on I-beams, past bomb-bay doors swinging open, beyond the hull of the flagship.

“
Come, Toe, let’s target the missiles,” he said, “before some Nik mine gets in the way of our trajectory.”

When they finished, H.C. allowed himself to relish the disgust again. “Freaks won’t seize our worlds, no sir, Director Herrschaft. You can count on us. If we have to burn their cities and feedcenters, till them under the ground, then dump salt into the furrows to keep Earth safe from freaks, that’s what we’ll do, sir!”

Within 38 missiles, 38 XEN Class artificial intelligences woke from electronic slumber and digested targeting information. Because they were not human, nor were they sentient, they didn’t question their orders.

Six men and eight women stood on the crate-crowded deck of the
Wanderlust
, one of several supply ships of EConautics Wing IX. Most of the crates had fallen and split open when the vessel had been struck by laserfire. The unmanned NKK hunter had rocketed out of the Jovian cloudtops where no enemies were supposed to be. Noxious fumes drifted throughout the vessel. One main rocket was stuck on at half-thrust, blasting the huge cubical cargohull up at a right angle to the ecliptic. Belowdecks, clangs and whirrs of frantic repairs carried into the cavernous room, accompanied by curses.

Even so, these fourteen crew granted Pehr Jackson and Janus Librarse full attention—after all, this man and woman were supposed to be dead; everyone saw the feed of when the
Bounty
became the war’s first victim. Seldom do the dead go comming among the living. It also helped that they had arrived completely nude.

Pehr and Janus finished explaining a rather strange story. But no one could argue—the two visitors proved beyond a doubt that they were here, inthflesh, not 3VRDs.

“
The war’s over,” Janus said. “NKK Feed Chairman Xiou and EarthCo Feedcontrol Director Herrschaft are dead.”

Wanderlust
’s crew shifted from foot to foot. One of the men glanced at one of the women. No one spoke.

“
All we came here for,” Pehr said, “was to make sure you didn’t launch your freight of missiles. This is one of the last vessels still in action close to a planet. It’s time for the killing to stop.”

One of the women, barely beyond adolescence, stepped forward. Narrow, green eyes peered up at Janus. She wore an armored spacesuit but had removed the helmet—as had the others—so her head looked tiny sticking out of the neck unit.

“
If what you’re saying is really true,” the woman said, “then
. . .
take me with you. I’m
. . .
not afraid.” A tightness around her eyes revealed that she wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Close enough
.

“
Anyone who wants to join us is welcome,” Pehr said. “But we can’t leave until we have your assurance that you’ll not unpack your heavy weapons.”

A few of the crew mumbled assent. The captain of the vessel, however, wasn’t present to make guarantees. She had died along with the rest of the bridge crew when that cabin explosively decompressed.

“
Anyway, I need to tell you something—” the woman said.

“
Gretta, be quiet,” one of the men said. “These two could be Nik spies for all we know.”

She spun to face him. “I don’t care! If the Niks have teleportation, then we don’t stand a chance against them, anyway. There’s no reason to continue killing people if the war’s already over.” Her voice turned bitter: “Besides, I’d rather die than stay aboard this derelict with you.”

The man broke away from the others, grumbling.

“
He might cause trouble,” the woman said in a confidential tone. When the man disappeared into a stairway in the deck, the other crew moved closer to Pehr and Janus.

“
So we can go wherever we want?”

“
I’d be able to put my feet back on the Earth?”

“
I can see my momma again?”

“
You say you can fix a guy’s injuries?”

Dozens of questions fired at Pehr and Janus, and they gladly answered. After a few more minutes, the crew dispersed to remove critical components needed to arm Wanderlust’s cargo of missiles in its single launch-tube. They returned, pieces of electronics in hand. Janus turned to Pehr.

“
We’ve never tried so many at once,” she said.

“
Should it matter?”

And so eleven crewmembers, lonely for home and thoroughly disenchanted with the notion of war’s glory after having experienced it firsthand, closed their eyes and held hands amid spilled crates of war materiel.

One of the men left behind watched a sort of sparkling dome, like a swarm of crystal fireflies, spread out from within the visitors and extend to his crewmates. Less than a second passed before every one of them disappeared. For just a moment, the sparkling dome seemed to turn pure black.

Then a slight
whoosh
as air filled in the spots where people no longer stood.

Damn
, the man thought.
So it was true
. He glanced around the interior of
Wanderlust
’s immense hold, saw the wreckage from their momentary skirmish, and listened to engineers curse as they tried to release a set of burned fuel valves. If his roommate hadn’t been standing beside him, he would have kicked every crate left intact, and then himself.

Images erupt from the stifled mind of Gretta, overpowering the dense array of memory from the other newcomers: Back on Earth, she is operating an earth-mover via headlink. The metal jaws scoop soil, dump it, scoop, dump; down she digs, deep beneath the surface. When the jaws spark against a concrete bunker in the shadowy base of the pit, she stops and asks for orders.

A new piece of equipment comes online, this one a crane with cutting attachments. She slices open the container—a square set of 42-centimeter cuts, as ordered—then moves aside the spinning blade so the crane’s clasp can lift free the block of cement. With that out of the way, she hauls 38 greasy cones, one by one, to a flatbed hauler. Gretta doesn’t spend more than a few seconds thinking about the painted markings on the sides of the cones: COBALT-60, with all the ancient symbols for radioactive danger. The name meant nothing to her then, a stockyard worker. But now, with access to the minds of physicists, she recognizes the dirty radiation-seeding element. . . .

Two days later, an EConautics Freight-Lieutenant drafts her onto his crew, which installs the warheads into 38 missiles. As she does so, the radiation-warning symbols keep intruding on her calm.
Why would EConautics want to put atomic warheads into service?
But she is too loyal to the corp that has taken her out of the landfill-mines and given her a comfortable life, and assumes only the best intentions. A month after that, she is thrilled to discover that her silence has been rewarded: She’s been promoted to crew an EConautics deep-space cargohull, bound for Jupiter. In orbit, she helps wrestle the missiles onto launch-arms jutting out from the Fleet Boss’ own destroyer. . . .

“
We’ve got to go back and stop him.”

“
But you promised you’d never force anyone else into artifact space,” Jonathan says. “I thought losing Nadir convinced you.” It was too much like my murdering Blackjack. . . .

*Jonathan, you must think of all who’ll die if we don’t stop him. See? Even now, his vessel accelerates toward Earth. Can’t you guess his intentions?*

“
You’re wrong!” Jonathan roars. His words silence the hundred voices murmuring all at once, dim the thousand memory-scenes playing for all to experience.

He continues in a pleading voice—only he tells his message with more than sound, with a series of scenes, imaginative projections into the future and memories pulled from the hundreds of minds now blending among ourselves. “Your perceptions are still twisted by intheflesh existence. You’ve got to dump the old paradigms, like Miru showed you. Don’t you realize that if we continue to use the artifact as a murder weapon it’ll fill up with mental pollution and crash everything? Anyway, what did anybody back on Earth ever do for you?”