Eternity's Mind (41 page)

“You all needed to see this,” Tasia said. All eyes remained on her, and she realized that the Roamers wanted her to make a suggestion. She wouldn't tell them it was hopeless, because she had not given up hope … although the thread had grown very small and thin within her.

“You need to understand,” she said, and her voice cracked, “that no place is safe.”

 

CHAPTER

71

EXXOS

As he scanned through his many centuries of memories, Exxos decided that
this
was the greatest victory he had ever experienced. He had recorded the countless transmissions from Earth, humans begging for their lives, crying for help, screaming in pain.

Because the original Klikiss race had created their downtrodden robots for the sole purpose of tormenting them, Exxos had an innate appreciation of pain and suffering. He had learned to savor it. He and his robots and the Shana Rei had left Earth as nothing more than a lifeless blackened ball, the entire population eliminated.

A complete success—and a good next step in the overall plan, following the destruction of Relleker and Wythira, as well as all those abandoned Klikiss worlds they had scorched. These were obvious achievements that even the chaotic Shana Rei could grasp. Exxos leveraged his victory and kept pushing for more.

The inkblot shadows did not argue. They simply agreed.

After gliding through the back channels of the void and reemerging outside the Onthos system, the Shana Rei used more dark matter to rebuild their damaged hex ships and re-create the lost robots. Exxos was so confident that the Shana Rei would do as he asked, he did not bother to calculate his losses except in an offhand way. More than 430,000 robot battleships and identical Exxos counterparts had been wiped out at Earth—nearly half of his complement.

He remembered a time, very recently, when any losses had been disasters, but now even a wholesale destruction of ships and robots was superfluous. The humans had suffered far greater losses.

Without hesitation or complaint, the Shana Rei acquired hex plates of dark matter and reassembled the component atoms into replacements for every one of the ships lost at Earth. And more.

Exxos pondered toying with Rod'h inside his entropy bubble. The prisoner had already served his purpose, but inflicting further pain and psychological torment was an end unto itself. It would be a way to celebrate their victory.

But before Exxos could approach the captive in his isolated entropy chamber, the void shifted and clarified. He found himself facing seven of the inkblot entities, formless black smears with a glowing eye of madness in the center.

“The destruction of Earth hurt us,” said one of the shadows.

Exxos braced himself for another round of the Shana Rei complaints. This time, though, the inkblots pulsed and grew, apparently stronger than before.

“Still, we comprehend the magnitude of the accomplishment. Humans project the most painful sentient screams throughout the cosmos. They needed to die. We acknowledge your correctness in choosing that target.”

Exxos was surprised. “The end of Earth moves us significantly closer to our victory—as I promised.” He realized that more of the Shana Rei had appeared around him, many more. He didn't know how many existed in total … or even if they existed in a definable number. “You should always listen to me.”

Their swelling shadow clouds had spilled into realspace and continued to grow as the void expanded. Eventually, Exxos knew, black nebulas would engulf the entire Spiral Arm and then the rest of the universe. The Shana Rei were manic and ambitious.

“You made a promise to me,” Exxos continued, “that if we helped you eradicate the pain of sentient life, you would reward us. You promised you would create a pocket universe that the black robots could rule all our own.”

“You will have your own universe to do with as you please,” said the pulsing inkblots. They began replacing the black robots Exxos had lost. “And we will enfold the rest of the real universe in a stew of primordial energy, as it was shortly after creation. But we have much work to do first. We will create more ships. You will attack more worlds. You will destroy more life.”

“Yes.” Exxos was pleased. “We will.”

In a very short time Exxos and his counterparts were ready to choose their next target. More important, he felt the restoration of their combined processing power. Once again, a million interlinked robots continued their underlying chaos calculations, working and reworking the highest-order mathematics to develop a system that would crystallize entropy and lock the Shana Rei into a stable state, freezing them out of their own existence.

Exxos was very anxious for that to happen.

He could feel his mind growing stronger as more copies of himself appeared, adding to his multiplex processing power. In secret, beneath the shadows' ability to detect, the black robots continued their calculations, working toward the end until—finally—they solved the ultimate equation.

Even though the Shana Rei had promised everything Exxos wanted, he did not trust them. The creatures of darkness were fickle and chaotic; it was their nature. The black robots needed a defense of their own.

Even if the Shana Rei were telling the truth, Exxos intended to destroy them. The universe belonged to the black robots. Everyone and everything else—including the creatures of darkness—were just in the way.

Now that the shadows had brought the remainder of his comrades back online, their processing power had been sufficient for his purpose. All of the black robots together now knew exactly how to end the Shana Rei—when it was time.

 

CHAPTER

72

SHAWN FENNIS

After the massacre in the medical center, the surviving misbreeds huddled together. Their shock continued to grow. Guard kithmen had responded to the emergency, but it had already been too late by the time they arrived. Although the guards were fierce and protective, they might pose just as great a threat if the shadows possessed them. Shawn Fennis now knew that all Ildirans could be dangerous.

And the misbreeds believed the whole universe was dangerous.

He shuddered as he held his injured wife, desperate to help her. Chiar'h had suffered three deep cuts right across her face, one along her arms, and a stab to the abdomen. Fennis gave her emergency care, sealing and binding her wounds to keep her from bleeding to death.

Several misbreeds, including poor Alaa'kh and Pol'ux, had not been so lucky. All of the possessed Ildiran medical kith had been slain. There had been no other choice.

Muree'n and Yazra'h drew the misbreeds together in a sheltered area to guard them, hoping that they could trust one another. No one else was completely safe.

Haunted, Fennis narrowed his eyes at any Ildirans who rushed in to respond to the crisis. He had grown up on Dobro, had helped rebuild that dark and sad colony after the end of the breeding program. The human and Ildiran survivors had learned how to live together, and now, a generation later, Fennis held no grudge against the former captors. He had genuinely fallen in love with Chiar'h. They were a perfect team, and someday they would have children with a viable mixture of genetics, but even if their halfbreed children turned out to be distorted misbreeds, Fennis would still love them.

From tending and serving these people in the sanctuary domes, he had sensed a strength and honor among the misbreeds. As they endured their physical deformities and pain, he saw their worth, and he had the utmost respect for their courage.

Fennis had failed to protect them here in the supposedly safe hospice, yet he would continue to try. For that, though, he needed an enemy he could see.

Chiar'h dozed in his arms but then awoke, wincing with pain. The cellular bindings had closed the slashes and stopped the bleeding, although she still hurt. There were more sophisticated Ildiran hospitals available, and medical kithmen who could provide better treatment, but Fennis didn't trust them right now. He clung to her in their small protected shelter.

A deep chill thrummed through him. What was it about the misbreeds that struck so much fear into the Shana Rei? How did they pose any sort of threat?

Gor'ka shuffled up and stared at him and Chiar'h with his three eyes, although the one that drooped down his waxy-looking cheek was milky and unfocused. He held up his one shriveled arm. “They pushed us. The misbreeds who remain alive are closer than ever. We must find a way to fight back and not hide any more.”

Har'lc came up to join him, a walking horror of rashes and scabs. “All of us can feel it. You will not understand entirely because you are human, Shawn Fennis, but the misbreeds are Ildiran. We are also more than that—not less. No matter what we may look like, we hold power within us. We are binding ourselves together, the last of us here, with a different kind of
thism.
We have our own network. Just us.”

Fennis didn't know how to respond to that. “And what does your network do?”

“We are still learning that,” Gor'ka said. He indicated Mungl'eh on her pallet. “But our strength will go through her.”

“When she sings,” Har'lc added.

“Yes, we all like it when she sings,” Fennis said.

Chiar'h stirred in his arms, made a contented noise. “Mungl'eh's voice is so beautiful.”

“It is more powerful than you can know,” Gor'ka added. “See what it can do now—to what we can do together.”

The surviving misbreeds gathered around the invertebrate misbreed. Mungl'eh lifted her head, raised her flipperlike arms. Even though the fountains in the recovery center continued to splash with a musical tinkling sound and misters added pleasant moisture to the air, Fennis could still smell the thick coppery scent of blood in the room.

But when Mungl'eh raised her voice and began to sing, the sour odor that carried so much pain seemed to vanish. The misbreeds hummed along with her, seeming to join together somehow into a single unit. Mungl'eh's melodious voice soared, lilted, rose and fell, and even though Fennis was not Ildiran, he felt invisible, surreal strings pulling at his mind, at his emotions.

Fully awake, Chiar'h sat up with a gasp. Energy from the misbreeds seemed to suffuse her, and the joined misbreeds were stronger still. The Shana Rei had snatched the minds of helpless Ildiran kithmen as pawns to murder the misbreeds, yet in so doing the shadows had provoked the misbreeds, pushing them beyond the edge of desperation, beyond their limits.

They had become something new.

Fennis thought he understood. These poor people had suffered adversity, struggled to overcome a sense of worthlessness, tried to find purpose in their lives. Now they had found it. They had an incentive. They were forged into a unit through a unique synergy that had not previously existed.

As Mungl'eh sang, she seemed to glow with energy. Her music grew more powerful, interlacing with the harmonies of the cosmos itself. Fennis's heart ached and yearned, swelling as if it might burst from the sheer beauty. This song was not just a demonstration of the misbreeds' sense of purpose. It was a song of infinity, a creation-wrenching performance strong enough to awaken eternity itself.

Mungl'eh sang, and sang.

And the universe sang back, awake at last.

 

CHAPTER

73

ROD'H

In his entropy prison, Rod'h was a captive, a victim, an experimental subject. And even though they were surely done with him, the Shana Rei would not let him die.

The black robots came to torment him again with malicious glee, but Rod'h refrained from showing terror. He couldn't flee, couldn't cooperate, was not able to give his captors what they wanted, because the Shana Rei did not
know
what they wanted, and the black robots already had their own plans.

Exxos came to him, moving in and out of the void, a nightmare of angled limbs and serrated claws that could slice his flesh to ribbons … and yet Rod'h's body healed each time. He survived, not only because of his halfbreed genetics, but because the rules of biology and physics did not apply in this place.

“Leave me alone or let me die,” Rod'h shouted as the black robot loomed before him.

“No,” Exxos said.

Even trapped inside here, Rod'h had witnessed the attacks on Relleker, Wythira, and now Earth. The Shana Rei and the black robots were exceedingly patient; they had all the time they needed to cause the destruction they desired. Rod'h dreaded that the shadows would hold him here and make him watch the end of the universe, no matter how long it took.

Shana Rei inkblots appeared around him as curious spectators. They never tired of watching his agony with their baleful eyes. He had no idea how much time had passed in the outside realm, perhaps only weeks, perhaps centuries.

But as they all hung in this nightmarish tableau, Rod'h suddenly noticed a difference in the universe … a twinge, a spark that skittered like chain lightning through the fabric of reality. The Shana Rei pulsed and writhed. Their glowing eyes flickered, blazed brighter, then faded. Rod'h could feel a thrumming … like music. Something awakening—far away. Something huge.

He felt that the creatures of darkness were terrified of some greater power, a presence so vast and all-encompassing that it drove them into frenzied disarray and panic. Rod'h had never understood that sentience before, and he didn't understand it now. But he felt it stirring.

“Eternity's Mind!” the Shana Rei wailed.

The sound became louder, echoing even through his entropy prison. The shadows could hear it, and they fluttered about like wings of darkness, but they could not escape.

His robot tormentors stirred in confusion. Their crimson optical sensors flared, their electronic voices buzzed. “What is this?”