Cenotaxis (5 page)

We are on our way again, swooping along the galaxy's Local Arm to where it joins the larger Sagittarius Arm. We are moving so quickly now that I feel giddy. Stars whiz by too fast to take in. Humanity's machines cling to these tiny lights like moths, sustaining their wards in unaccountable ways. I am left with an impression of life everywhere, in every possible form. I see no overt sign of the catastrophe Bergamasc trumpets as the reason for his invasion of Earth—no destroyed habitats, no tumbling corpses—but there is a militarized edge visible everywhere. Vast fleets gather on the borders of civilized spaces; strange weapons acquire targets and prepare to fire.

We slow down in a system comprised of eight stars orbiting a truly enormous supergiant. Here the sense of industry is at fever pitch. Every world in our crowded vicinity is overflowing with people. The vacuum hums with information.

"This is Hyperabad, where it all started," Bergamasc tells me. "Here's where I found my calling, as it were. It's not my home, but it's probably the closest thing I have to one now. Emotions run very high here. I've been shot at more times than I can count—and the gifts are sometimes more than I can bear."

"Why are you showing me all this?"

He glances over his shoulder at me, disappointed, as though his motives should be obvious. "So you know what you're fighting."

"I'm not fighting this place, or any of the others you've shown me. The people who live here are not my enemies. I'm just defending my own."

"The difference is academic, Jasper. If you're not fighting us, then we should be on the same side. Why aren't we, exactly?"

I don't dignify the question with an answer.

He persists. "I mean that quite seriously. It'd be much easier for both of us if we weren't enemies. The Earth wouldn't be a battleground and I'd be able to direct my attention elsewhere. You could go back to doing your thing without me getting in the way. Nothing would have to change, not really."

His easy, overly familiar superiority vexes me in ways I cannot properly express. "Take me back to my cell. There's no mystery there."

"You don't have to be my prisoner," he says. "I'm offering you a way out."

"You want more than I can give."

"I'm not asking for the world," he snaps, infuriated himself now. "Just its name."

"Everything we have, in other words."

"Don't be overdramatic."

"Is that what I'm being? Let's see how calm you are, when you have nothing left to call your own."

"I've been there," he says.

The virtual view jolts into motion. Were I in a real space vessel, I would have crossed half the galaxy in less than a minute. The dusty core swings by us, ablaze in all frequencies. We swing through its outermost edge, and then back out into the fringes.

"There's one more thing I want you to see." Bergamasc is pacing again.

I fold my arms and wait out the illusion. When we stop, we appear to be hanging over a cold cinder of a world, sole companion of a flare-wracked star. The surface of the planet is clearly sterile, but I make out geometric shapes that might once have been transport grids, and burned patches where cities could have rested. We are far out on the edge of the Milky Way. One side of the sky is glorious with the spiral of the galaxy, seen at an angle so it gashes blazingly across the firmament. The other side is dark and empty, apocalyptic.

"What is this place?"

"The first hit by the Slow Wave."

"The thing that killed the Forts did this?"

"No." He shakes his head. "We did—humans in a panic when the old regime fell. This is our real enemy, Jasper: chaos, fear, mistrust, decay. That's what I'm fighting, because if we backslide any further, we'll lose everything. Piece by piece, the great works we accomplished will crumble to dust—and if we're unlucky or particularly stupid, we'll all follow. So I've set myself up as a symbol of hope—a rallying point for those who want the same things as me, and a threat to anyone standing in our way. That's why I have to come down hard on those who don't buy the act. It's not because I'm afraid you'll expose the truth. It's because everyone already knows the truth, but as long as no one speaks it aloud we can get on with the business of rebuilding."

"It's utter fantasy," I tell him. "Group hypnosis. Hysteria. And you have the gall to call me delusional."

"Indeed I do. Because what I do helps people. We are rebuilding. We are making progress. What are you doing but sitting on your arse in your backward corner of the universe, contemplating your own centre of gravity? Tell me what good that is doing the galaxy!"

"God moves in mysterious ways, Bergamasc. Those words are older than either of us."

"Utter nonsense." He sticks his fingers into his hair and grips his skull as though in agony. "Sometimes I wonder if we'll ever agree on anything."

"Why do we have to? Creation is large enough to accommodate our differences."

"Not while you refuse to give me the Earth."

The illusion dissolves around us. I am back in my plastic cell. My ear itches where the message mosquito bit it. I am assaulted physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Bergamasc is no longer in the cell with me. I don't watch him as he paces like a tiger on the wrong side of the cage, but I can hear him. The rhythm now seems more hesitant than martial, limping along to an uncertain destination. I wonder if he will bring in Helwise again, to do that which he himself can't stomach.

"Earth will never be yours," I tell him. "Not while I live."

"So why don't I just pull out a pistol right now and shoot you dead?"

There it is: the first uttering of the threat he will one day make real.

"You can't do that," I say, thinking of the days in his future that I've yet to see.

"Why not? All that's stopping me is my inclination to keep you alive, not your so-called divinity. Only a foolish man would rely on the permanence of that impulse."

It's too difficult to explain to him. "Anything born can die," I concede.

"You were born, then?" He waits for an answer, then persists. "I've shown you where I came from. You could return the favor."

I don't answer because I don't need to. He finds the place in his own time. That I know for certain.

A pink dawn shines on the tip of a cast-iron arrow, upthrust by a seventeen-meter-high statue of the Roman god Vulcan. Sunlight and metal, fire and forge—this is the first thing I ever saw, and the image haunts me still. In my ears rang the words of a man I closely resembled, as though he had spoken them just moments before:

"A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization of space will surely find the way..."

To do what? To where? The thought was unfinished. I could sense its incompleteness hanging in the air of the pine forest crowding the base of the sandstone tower on which the mighty statue stood, arrow in one hand, hammer in the other. By Vulcan's left foot rested—and still rests, I hope—the anvil of his craft. Armorer of the gods, builder of the thrones of Mount Olympus, patron deity of the alchemists, he gazed not at me but at the sky, as though waiting for something to come out of it.

A god, perhaps. A gods' god, clad in fire and steeped in the ages. A
human
god cut loose of the shackles of causality and free to wander the eternity of time...

"Hello, Jasper," spoke a voice into my mind, and I recognized its source just as I recognized myself: the Apparatus, the being whose sole existence is to act as factotum to the rightful ruler of Earth. Knowledge trickled into me: the sprawling inheritance of every person born after the twenty-first century. Layers upon layers of fact and fiction, interpretation and spin—almost a million years of pooled knowledge that summed up the thoughts and history of the species that created me. Intricate pathways reminiscent of trees branching—or rivers, or veins—led me back in time from that moment to the man whose physical form I have been given, and whose words still rang on the crisp, morning air.

An image of an ammonite came to me then, as though from a dream. The thought of a gunshot, too, had currency. But how could I have dreamed of anything before I was alive? I put the strange thought from my mind and concentrated on the world around me.

"Thank you," I told the Apparatus. "I'll be glad of your company."

The enduring backbone of Red Mountain lay firm beneath my feet. Under the reaching limbs of the endless forest lay the remains of the magic city, the Birmingham of Edward O. Wilson's birth. The man who had once been called Charles Darwin's natural heir hadn't lived long enough to become an Old-Timer, but his works have not been forgotten. Immortalized in the collective memory of humanity, he has been granted a memorial of a kind in me, this new Vulcan—an intersection of fire and forge, sunlight and metal, humanity and god.

The sentence completed itself in my mind, summoned from memory as easily as breathing: "...find the way to save the integrity of this planet and the magnificent life it harbors."

I took a deep breath and set out on foot through the sycamore, oak, and pine in search of Shade's Valley and Black Warrior River. With my metabolism attuned more closely to the rhythm of the Earth, I had all the time in the world to see what the future held.

It has stopped snowing over southeastern Australia, and the light reflecting off the back of the continent's largest glacier is blindingly bright. I am traversing it in slow, unhurried steps, taking stock of the world's wonders with no clear destination.

The day doesn't last long before dawn comes again and I am once more embroiled in war.

We are discussing tactics, Alice-Angeles, the Apparatus and I. Our next target is a munitions dump on the former Libyan coast. I am distracted and withdrawn. Today, Bergamasc's ultimatum hangs over me like a black cloud.

"Is it worth the risk?" I ask them. They have learned not to take such questions rhetorically, for humanity's god is allowed to experience the odd moment of doubt.

"It's just sitting there," says Alice-Angeles, her fine, hairless features pinched with determination. "They think we're on the other side of the planet. We'll be in and out before they can scramble a single suborbital."

The Apparatus backs her up. "Traffic movements do suggest that the facility has been left unusually vulnerable following insurgencies in the mid-African farm belt. This mission therefore has a high probability of success."

"If we can see that, then he can see it too." I want to tell them what I know about Imre Bergamasc: that he is a ruthless tactician; that he probably has a spy among us even now; that he will eventually take me captive, somehow, and threaten me with execution because he is too busy to keep me alive. But what point would that serve, except to fill my functionaries with a sense of futility? The battle is important, regardless of the war. The journey, not the destination, is paramount.

Later, Imre Bergamasc will bring up the matter of the munitions dump, as he will the trap in Paratlantis.

"You kept us waiting longer than we expected," he'll say, a single line of frustration between his eyes. "Longer than we could plausibly maintain the breach in security. When you did come, the attack was botched and you retreated. Both of us failed, that time, but it was your hesitation that did us both in. Why did you take so long? We'd have been spared a full year of war if you'd moved when you were supposed to."

There is little satisfaction in the thought of less war for those on the losing side, so I say nothing. Let him come to his own conclusions about each individual campaign. I am more concerned with the larger picture—and this is something Alice-Angeles and the Apparatus also fail to grasp. What is one munitions dump in the long arc of the war, one planet when the fate of an entire galaxy is at stake, and one man against the long-term survival of the human race?

These are the thoughts that consume me.

"Sometimes I wonder," Bergamasc will say, "if you were hard to catch because your tactics were brilliant, or if your movements were completely random."

"God always has a purpose."

"I've yet to see it."

I think about what he has said in his future and my past. Not about the deadline, for to me that is meaningless, but his accusation that I haven't tried hard enough to put myself in his shoes. Could that be true? I certainly spent a great deal of time trying to anticipate his tactics and motives. That, however, is not the same thing. Late in my captivity, our conversation is dominated by his theories about the Apparatus and his inability to accept my true nature. Perhaps I have paid too little attention to who he is and what he needs. After all, he will be the one holding the gun to my head, if I fail to satisfy him.

But how can I satisfy someone who refuses so stubbornly to accept the truth? What more will it take? He has it all now, except for the Apparatus, and while I retain that bargaining chip, he surely won't do anything too drastic.

Unless he's decided that the value of the chip has now exceeded the irritation of my continued existence. Or I have fascinated him so much that he's willing to test me to the point of destruction. Which way has Imre Bergamasc, would-be Prime Minister of Earth, fallen?

I do not know him well enough to answer, so the problem remains.

Perhaps there is something I have missed. Perhaps my assumption that I've told him everything is incorrect. I probe my memories of the days we have shared, he and I, from that first exchange of words the day he arrived in orbit, with the engines of his army outshining the stars. I lay the recollections before me like pieces of a puzzle, fragmented and jumbled as they came to me.

The day passes. My uncertainty lingers.

Our times in captivity vary greatly. There was no torture for Imre Bergamasc in Lop Nur. He was treated civilly when Alice-Angeles and the others finally caught up with us, shaken but unharmed. We regrouped and loaded as much as we could into the five remaining vehicles. Only when we were ready to leave did I take a moment to greet our captive.