Cenotaxis (6 page)

He stepped out of the six-wheeler with elegant control, a man smaller than I with a shock of white hair and slender limbs. Two troopers brought him to a halt five paces from me. His wrists were bound in front of him, and his blue gaze flicked from face to face until he saw me. Then he straightened.

"I've seen your picture, Dennis Jasper Murphy," he said without a trace of unease on his face. "Glad to finally make your acquaintance."

"Call me Jasper. The feeling isn't mutual."

I held the dead man's switch tightly in my left hand while the rain thundered relentlessly into the mud between us. We didn't step any closer to each other than that.

"Shall I kill him?" asked Alice-Angeles.

"Why?"

"With him dead, the war ends."

"One of his generals would take over. Motivated by a genuine grievance, they'd fight even harder."

"Quite right," Bergamasc agreed. "The last thing you want is Helwise on your case."

I remembered the cold-faced woman who would interrogate me in the future of that moment. He didn't know that I knew her, but he spoke as though I ought to. That psychological game, I told myself, would never work.

"It's all right," I said to Alice-Angeles. "We're going to win the war, so it's important we be courteous—even forgiving—along the way. He's only doing what he thinks is right."

"You really believe you can stand up to the entire galaxy?" Bergamasc asked me.

"I see only one man in front of me. One man challenging God. The odds, you'll find, are heavily stacked in my favor."

"I guess it depends on where you're standing," he said.

"I know exactly where I'm standing." I pointed at the common grave nearby, where five of my own troopers lay. "Your man is buried over there. You can collect him later."

"Thanks, but that's okay. There are plenty more like Al where I come from."

His lack of concern surprised me. What kind of leader spoke with such disdain of a fallen comrade? Only later did I learn that the soldier called Alphin Freer is a member of that class of human called "singletons," whose identity has been copied many times over, making the issue of an individual's death much harder to measure than the demise of a single body.

"Get him in back inside," I told Alice-Angeles. "I want us in Malan by nightfall." By the time dawn strikes Station Zero, I really meant. "If he moves so much as a finger, knock him out."

"What happened to being courteous?" Bergamasc asked as she shoved him back toward the six-wheeler.

I put the switch back into my pocket. "I have limits."

"You and me both."

Those words seem prophetic to me later, as I reflect on his ultimatum in my cold, stone cell. Was he warning me, even then, that we might come to such an end? Does he too have a rudimentary sense of the future as a place that already exists, that our only mission in life is to find our way there, by whatever means we possess in our individual natures?

The day he took me into his custody couldn't have been more different. I was frog-marched at the centre of a cordon of no less then twelve soldiers in full battle dress, two of them Alphin Freers that obviously held a grudge for their twin's demise in Lop Nur. They paraded me in front of a vast assembly of captured frags, while Imre Bergamasc brooked no uncertainty over his intentions.

"Behold the man you call your God! Not so grand now, is he?"

The assembly was silent and unmoving. All I heard was the susurrus of breath, multiplied a thousand times over.

"I am proud of you," I told them, moved by their resolute stillness. "You are the true inheritors of Earth!"

A rifle butt knocked me to the ground, but not before my words were picked up by the frags nearest me and passed in whispers through the ranks. Too late, my cordon hauled me unceremoniously from view. I heard the murmur rising through the walls as rough hands thrust me to the ground.

"He's a one-man crusade," commented a massive, heavily scarred man leaning against one wall with arms folded across his barrel chest. "Look at him, taking all our glory."

"Save it, Render." Helwise was there too, and a fourth person I hadn't seen before: a slight blonde woman with green eyes. She watched me closely as I struggled to my feet and stood, waiting with dull certainty for the next blow. The solid iron links of my chains were supposed, I assumed, to be symbolic, yet in a strange way I had never before felt more triumphant.

Here they were, the members of the pretender king's inner circle, all in one spot—and I among them! If only I'd had a bomb, or a single word that would convert them all.

"Is everyone on this fucking planet a frag?" Helwise asked as the sound of the crowd grew louder still.

"There's no shame in that," I told her.

"This guy isn't a frag," said one of the Freers. "He's a Prime."

"There's no shame in that, either."

"I know," Bergamasc agreed, and I understood for the first time, then, that he was a Prime too, a deliberate throwback to the oldest form of humanity. He circled me like a hungry predator. "Why do they follow you?"

"They follow God."

"Whose will is handed to them by you, I suppose."

"The two are inseparable."

"I see. So what other end do you envisage than me crushing your resistance and making the Earth my own?"

"Your role in this drama is less important than you imagine."

"You're going to tell me that I'm acting in accordance with God's will, whether I want to or not." Before I could shake my head, he ploughed on, "Were I to retreat to orbit and sterilize the surface of this pain-in-the-arse planet, that would obviously be what God wanted."

There was no point arguing with his primitive misconceptions, or his sarcasm. "You won't do that."

"No." He moved in closer, still circling, so close we almost brushed against each other. "But the temptation is very real. You have to understand that. I've taken such measures before, in the best interests of the galaxy. I'm not going to let one tiny world stand in my way."

"Earth is more than just a world. It's an idea. It's the birthplace of God."

I would have told him more, perhaps, but his patience had run out. "Enough about God! I've been running that scam myself for longer than I care to remember. There's no more fervent atheist than a prophet who doesn't believe in himself."

He backed off, snapping his fingers at the Freers. "Take him away. I'll work out what to do with him later."

The scarred soldier leaned in as I was manhandled through the door. "You'll soon be broken down," he said, "like all the rest."

I stared resolutely at the long, metal corridor ahead.

Later, the blonde woman came to see me.

"My name is Emlee Copas," she said, standing comfortably on the other side of the clear plastic pane separating me from freedom, dressed in a loose blue shipsuit bearing no visible markings of rank or honor. "Imre's agreed to let me talk to you because I'm a Prime too. So's Render, who you spoke to earlier. He's an Old-Timer, in fact, with a greater claim on this planet than either you or Imre will ever have. I find that ironic, don't you?"

I stared at her, holding the silence until it became uncomfortable.

"There's actually something I want to ask you," she went on. "The frag situation fascinates us. We've only seen a handful of planets populated by nothing but frags, and they've always been something special. We've dissected a couple of yours who were killed in battle and discovered that they, like the frags of every other Fort in the galaxy, were connected by Q loop technology, the same thing targeted by the Slow Wave. So whatever was going on here, it was stopped dead by the same thing that killed the Continuum. What was going on here, Jasper? Was the whole population of the planet linked into the mind of a single Fort?"

This was my first attempt to explain. "Let me tell you something, Emlee Copas. There's no difference between you and my followers. We're all part of a greater whole. By that I don't mean the galactic civilization you belong to—although I'm sure your leader has you firmly convinced that this is indeed the whole of human experience—but the inner whole, aspirations that speak to more than just territory and possessions."

"I have a brain of my own," she said with a scowl. "I make up my own mind."

"Then hear what I have to say. Civilization is important; don't get me wrong on that point. We wouldn't be here now but for that step up the ladder. But it's only one step of many, and you can see how easy it is to trip up, now your Forts are gone.

"Continuity and synchrony are the ties that hold any civilization together, for many diverse and widely separate layers must work at different rates to achieve the greatest good, sometimes without even knowing it. Take away those ties, and the fabric unravels.

"At the galactic level, across hundreds and thousands of years, those ties are stretched to their breaking points. If humanity is to evolve any further, it must find new ways to connect those far-flung parts."

"What kind of ties are you talking about, Jasper? Better communications? FTL travel? Is that what you were working on here?"

I shook my head in irritation. "This is where the metaphor breaks down. You're like an architect designing a skyscraper large enough to reach the moon by simply adding more floors. That's not nearly enough. Everything—foundations, materials, design—must be fundamentally reassessed. That's why, after almost a million civilized years, we're still struggling to connect the dots."

"But you've worked it out, I gather. You know what the answer is."

"I am the answer, Emlee. My very existence is proof that humanity can make the next step—from drawing a sketch to lifting the pencil right off the page and becoming the mind that makes the sketch unfold."

"Is this where God fits in?" she asked, frowning.

"God is the face humanity sees reflected in the void."

"Its own face or something else?"

"Its own face."

"And what does it look like, Jasper?"

"It's beautiful." Rapture filled me. "Abandon the old ways, Emlee Copas, and adopt the new, for what once was, and is, and will be are one."

I was standing with my face almost touching the plastic pane, as close to her as I could possibly come. If I could convince her, she would convince Bergamasc, and my real work would begin.

"I don't think that's going to happen any time soon," she said, her posture relaxed and unimpressed. "But give it your best shot, by all means. Or was that it? Are you done now? Can we move on to more important things?"

She was utterly unmoved. Naturally, I thought, Bergamasc wouldn't send someone easily converted to be my first interrogator.

"My work is far from finished," I said, stepping back from the plastic barrier. "And there is nothing more important on Earth than that work. You'll come to realize it, in your own time. I know it."

"You won't find us as easy to convince as a bunch of lost frags, believe me."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

She left, and I spent the next four days in the cell alone.

Memory consumes me. I am unused to reviving my personal past so determinedly, for so long. There's rarely any necessity, thanks to the way the tangle of time unspools around me. I find the two difficult to separate on occasion, and distracting to an extreme.

While hiking among a landscape of reds and oranges, I unexpectedly experience another moment of genuine disorientation, one in which I do not know where or when I am. My limbs feel heavy. My mind is fogged. I'm lying on my side, curled into a ball, on a hard surface that is vibrating rapidly against my skin. I can't move my hands or feet. There appears to be bag over my head. I smell ozone and sweat.

"He's awake," someone says.

The bag is pulled away. Light strikes my sensitive eyes, and for a full second I don't recognize Bergamasc leaning over me.

"Hello, Jasper. Are you feeling okay?"

"Where am I?"

"You tell me. What's the last thing you remember?"

"Climbing in the Kimberleys." I struggle to focus. "Before the war."

"Really?" Bergamasc glances at someone out of my sight. "You don't remember what we were talking about last night?"

"No. What day was that?"

He looks unsatisfied by my responses, but not resigned. "We gassed you, Jasper, so you'd sleep through the transition. If you hadn't noticed it passing, I thought we might find you out." He shrugs. "No matter. That's not the only card in the deck."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"No. I suppose not. It's not as if we've done this with your consent." Bergamasc smiles a fleeting challenge. "We've been studying you, while you've been our guest. You undergo a pronounced mood swing once a day, without any measurable physiological change. You display a kind of selective amnesia too, although that's not a consistent symptom. We've analyzed the transition from every possible angle in an attempt to figure it out. We've even moved you without you knowing, to see if that would change the timing of it. It didn't. We're as much in the dark as we were before. But we didn't waste our time completely. There was one small thing we noticed."

He pauses, waiting for me to ask. I don't give him the satisfaction.

"The transition is seasonal, or appears to be. That is, the period grows longer and shorter depending on the time of year. The difference is subtle but real. That tells me the transition is triggered by an event external to your head, an event tied to a particular place. The variation gives us a rough latitude—somewhere near the thirty-third parallel, as it happens. All we have to do is pick a time of day, and that will give us the longitude. I've reasoned that the event your transition is linked to isn't likely to be the rising of a particular star or planet; neither is it likely to be the phases of the moon.

"My guess is that it's either dawn or sunset. What do you think, Jasper? Can you shed some light on the subject? Pardon the pun, naturally."

I can tell by his tone that he already knows the answer to the question. "Spare me the charade, Bergamasc. You're wasting your energy."