Cenotaxis (7 page)

"I don't think so. We're still trying to figure you out. You might be suffering from a multiple personality disorder with delusions of grandeur on the side. In other words, this could be a fantasy you've concocted in order to make yourself feel special. Or is there really something to the transition, something we should look at more closely? This is the scientific method, Jasper. I'm testing you the only way I'm able."

I want to tell him that God cannot be tested, but of course that isn't true. The true God arises out of humanity, and humanity in turn arises out of the universe and all its laws. Emergent properties abound, and while they may not always be predictable, they are definitely examinable by science.

So I say nothing.

His expression doesn't change. "Open the doors, Al."

A crack opens in the wall to my right, letting in a powerful, whipping wind. My eyes, only recently adjusted to the interior light, are blinded once again by the sun. I hold up a hand to blot out the glare while I struggle to focus. I dimly discern the blue of sky and the green of vegetation. That we are in an airship is immediately clear, hovering a hundred meters or so above the ground. I make out hills, a valley, the slow meander of a river.

In direct view below us, a forty-meter-high stone tower rises out of the sycamore, oak and pine, with a cast-iron giant on its summit, proudly holding an arrow up to the stars.

"Very quaint," says Bergamasc. "I've been watching the area for a week. There's nothing here but this old thing, and no funny business going on inside it. But every time the sun hits the tip of that arrow, you change, no matter where you are. What's going on, Jasper? What's so important about this place?"

My heart feels ready to break as I stare down at Vulcan. He is looking directly at me, calmly confident. "This is where I was born," I say.

"What does that have to do with your transition? Why the mood swings and amnesia? Why here?"

"Why not here? It's important that God remains tied to the cycles of the Earth, to the womb of humanity. It is humbling. You call yourself a Prime, but I see in you the consequences of forgetting our origins."

"And I see in you the consequences of passive self-righteousness. How far would this God of yours have spread if you never left the planet?"

"God isn't a plague that propagates across the stars—although you might think of it that way. God simply is, acknowledged or not."

"We're all part of God," Bergamasc repeats, "so we're all doing God's will. Well, in a moment, I'm going to ask Al here to take out a rifle and melt that statue where it stands."

I straighten in alarm. "Why would you do that?"

"To see if it changes the timing or frequency of your transitions. It would be far easier for me if our conversations weren't constantly interrupted and I didn't have to explain what we were up to every time we talked."

"But it's a relic of the Old-Times, priceless—"

"What does that matter? We're making new and grander history on a million worlds, far from here. That's where you'll find God, I suspect, not in some rusty artifact on a forgotten world."

"God is everywhere, from the very large to the very small. You can't possibly know how it all fits together."

"And you do? Or are you just kidding yourself?"

"I must have known, or how would I have resisted you for so long?"

"That's what I want to find out. Was it luck or because some secret Fort helped you?"

"Why can't the answer be God?"

"Because I don't believe." He is angry now, angry in a way I've never seen before. "God is either a crutch for the weak or a tool for the strong. It's nothing else. Whatever's going on with you, there has to be another explanation. If you looked as long and hard at yourself as I have, you'd know what it was. Or perhaps you do know, and you simply won't tell me."

A fleeting fear, that I might be thrown bodily from the aircraft, tossed out like garbage, races through me.

"Something happened here," growls Bergamasc. "Something important, just before the Forts died, something involving all the frags. An experiment, perhaps, and whatever killed the Forts also stopped that experiment in its tracks. I think that you're the result of that experiment—incomplete and self-deluded, but here all the same. At least partly finished."

"God isn't made in a test-tube."

"No. Exactly. So what are you, Jasper?
What are you?"

I cannot give him an answer that he hasn't already dismissed.

We land and I am imprisoned behind the bars of a cell they have constructed in Vulcan's sandstone plinth. I don't know if Bergamasc ever made good on his promise to destroy the statue, but my daily ritual continues unchecked.

Outside I hear the sound of trees being felled to make way for Bergamasc's camp. I do not mourn them as I mourn the frags who have died in my service, but I do feel a pang of regret with each mighty, slow-motion collapse. If my enemy truly does fell whole worlds as easily as he levels this ancient forest, am I only delaying the axe-blow by standing in his path?

I know how the war progresses and that at some point I am captured; but how that capture comes about is still unknown to me. What if it's true that I have been betrayed without knowing it? Bergamasc may be mistaken and misguided, but I have rarely known him to lie.

If I had executed him while he was in my hands, as Alice-Angeles suggested, I might have spared myself this dilemma. A general of lesser charisma and inferior brilliance could actually have been easier to deal with, in the long run. Helwise's instincts would have been to crush our resistance at any cost to the Earth itself, and that would have resulted in outright war with the Round. The galaxy would never have stood for that. Instead I am entangled in this complex game whose rules change as quickly as they come into focus.

Because I didn't kill him...

We had little to say to each other in Lop Nur, and not just because I had the safety of Alice-Angeles and the others on my mind. I decided while on the journey to Malan that I would leave Bergamasc there with the nuke that I had promised to abandon. His own jamming would prevent him calling for help, and thus alerting his underlings that we could be safely targeted. That head start, I hoped, would give us the edge we needed to get to safety.

We did talk some, though, in Malan, sheltered for the night in a self-repairing nuclear waste complex, circa the twenty-second century, when he commented on our out-of-date provisions.

I responded that humanity has existed in an anachronistic state ever since it invented history. For almost a million years, the layers of knowledge we have created have been pressing against each other like geological strata. Faults and folds create strange juxtapositions and resonances between facts that are otherwise entirely unconnected, giving present society a richness unimaginable in earlier times.

He agreed, noting his own use of anachronistic terms and tactics, and technology too. "Whatever works. The ends justify the means."

"What if your ends are the wrong ends? What if anachronism isn't enough?"

"For what?"

"For the attainment of humanity's grandest desire: to become as gods."

He frowned, an expression with which I am now very familiar. "You think we should be more anachronistic?"

"More than anachronistic," I said. "That's just the first step."

Before I could explain more, Alice-Angeles interrupted to tell me that the Apparatus had found a landline into the complex. The gestalt possessed data I needed to see immediately.

I ended the conversation with Bergamasc without regret, and I let him go in Malan, just as I promised myself I would. He tried to talk to me before we parted ways, but I ignored him. I had a campaign to prepare for, other priorities. He looked puzzled and hurt as we drove away. Chained to the side of the nuke, he appeared, in the relentless rain, to be transparent and devoid of color. He seemed to find my ignoring of him far more affronting than resentment or hatred.

Two days out of Malan, we were pounded by micro-missiles dropped from orbit. The fury of the attack was unprecedented. Alice-Angeles and I barely escaped with our lives. My boxer was killed when a sliver of metal sliced half his head clean off. Even dying, he tried to protect me, clutching at my arm to hold me close. I had to shake him loose with some considerable effort.

Another dawn ticks by, and Bergamasc is sitting before me, holding a new moon of bread crust in one hand. I smell the rich aromas of olive oil and cheese. The produce is fresh and of local origin. Occasionally I can smell baking from beyond the walls of my stone cell.

"Welcome back," he says. "Have a nice trip?"

I realize then that this is no ordinary day. It falls between the second and third dawns of his ultimatum—and if he has his way, it will be my last. There have been times when, in the grip of a fleeting fury, I have thought him quite capable of the attempt. What mood will he be in tomorrow morning?

We were talking a moment ago, he and I, but for a moment I can't place the terminus of our conversation.

Instead I ask him, "How much do you think you know?"

"You tell me. Don't you already know how this conversation will end?"

"It doesn't work like that."

"Why don't you tell me how it does work, then? I'm listening."

I think back to Malan, and to the few words we exchanged there, and I decide that I am tired of playing games.

"It's really not so complicated. I don't see time the way you do—but that doesn't mean I see the future. Not as you think it means. I can see some parts of your future, sometimes. Not all of them. It's the same with the past. I can see the days I've lived, just like you, only my days don't clock forward one at a time. My life winds through the past and future, following a different kind of progression to the one you're used to. And why shouldn't that be so? Physics shows us that this moment we both call 'the present' is the one that matters. How we came to be here, and where we go from here, is entirely arbitrary."

He is listening. "Can you control which days you see?"

"No, and I can't revisit a day I've already lived. I can only keep moving, as you do, but..." My right hand inscribes a complicated spiral through the air. "...around."

"You've never told me this before. Why not?"

"I knew I would tell you at some point. That point is now. Sooner or later, by your frame of reference, means nothing to me."

He nods slowly. "Hence the transition. Hence your mood swings. And hence the mistakes you made on the field, too. Presumably you didn't learn a key piece of information you'd need on some days until after those days were passed—because there are gaps in your history, counterbalanced by the fact that you can see some days in the future. Right?"

"You persist in believing that I made mistakes. But apart from that, you are correct. Does that mean you believe me?"

His gaze dissects me like a blue-diamond scalpel. He doesn't immediately answer the question. "Tell me something about the future, Jasper. Tell me about one of the days you've lived that I haven't yet."

I have anticipated this. "No."

"Why not? Are you worried about changing the future? I wouldn't have thought that possible, since it's already in your past."

"It isn't possible, and I am not a circus performer."

"What if I were to give you a detailed history of our campaign here on Earth? Troop deployments, supply lines, objectives, everything. You could take that information back into the past and use it while working out your tactics on those days you haven't lived. Would that cause a conflict?"

"It would if I were to do it. I won't."

"But you could. That's what you're telling me. And in a sense, you already have. You've used this supposed trick of yours to stay one step ahead of me, until we caught you in a way you didn't foresee."

"I do what I can to survive, and to keep the ones I hold dear alive too. That's all anyone does."

"True enough." Again the blue gaze pierces me, then darts away. "You haven't told me why, yet—why you're like this. Is there a reason, or were you just born that way? A freak, a sport?"

"I am neither," I tell him, my tone wounded, and I wish momentarily that I had never tried to explain. The concept stands so clearly in my mind that I am dismayed he does not grasp it immediately. "Anachronism, a mistake in time, is inevitable for beings with memory. We hold the history of humanity in our heads—millions of novels, inventions, maps, formulae, everything. Is it any wonder they begin to overlap?

"This overlapping forms a glue that binds human culture together down almost a million years. But alone it is not enough to take us to the next stage of our evolution. Bigger, longer-lived, more powerful, yes; but to become fundamentally different, we need something more powerful than memory alone."

"Fundamentally different how?" he asks.

"Well, humanity has always aspired to become like its gods. The god latter-day humanity needs is one that doesn't know the meaning of the word 'anachronistic' The overlapping of memory is inferior to the overlapping of time itself. Do you see? When we genuinely experience all times as one, there will be no mistakes in time. When we have become
achronistic
rather than merely anachronistic, we will go from being well-dressed apes to God manifest—beyond time, beyond death, beyond human."

I study him, seeking any sign at all that he has begun to understand. But, in truth, I'm not surprised that Bergamasc resists the pull of nonlinear chronologies. He is a military man, heavily steeped in macroscopic notions of cause and effect. It will take him time to accept that macroscopic phenomena are ephemeral, that the universe dances to unimaginably complex rhythms at the scales of the very small and the very large. We are sandwiched between them, bacteria caught in two glass slides, and we are foolish to forget the eye peering down the microscope at us.

"To what end?" Bergamasc asks, tugging at the fraying limits of his understanding like a bulldog. "There is no end, and no point. I mean, look at you. One day you're here; tomorrow you could imagine yourself free again. In that sense, you can escape these bars as easily as falling asleep. But the bars aren't ever going away, Jasper. What sort of life is that?"