Invoking Darkness (42 page)

Ahead, a second tunnel led off to their right. Sheridan knew that the enemy wanted to control his course, and that his only hope of escape lay in avoiding the enemy's design. Sheridan pressed himself against the right wall, and with a quick swing of his head, peeked down the new tunnel.

The rock beside him exploded with plasma fire, and he jerked back. He brought his gun up to his chest and, with a deep breath, leaned again into the open, fired a burst of shots. As the attackers, two Drakh, returned fire, the ceiling above Sheridan collapsed, stones raining down on him. He fell under the onslaught, pain erupting in his head, shoulder.

The Drakh ceased their attack, and the tunnel grew silent. After a few seconds, Sheridan staggered to his feet, continued down the tunnel in the direction the enemy had chosen for him. After a few more seconds, he realized he had lost his gun in the rock-fall. How he would last another minute without it, Kosh didn't know. It couldn't be true.

* * *

Wierden, who had brought order to the early techno-mages a thousand years ago, who had founded the Circle, who had established the Code – Wierden here, at the heart of the Eye. As one, the machine people surrounding Galen broke from their web, turned, and grabbed on to him. Their movement propagated outward, in circle upon circle, machine people shifting, severing their connections to Wierden and reforming them with him.

Galen felt his awareness expanding, the burning yellow light of his energy surging up and rushing out through the web of machine people, along the vast underground channels and shafts of the Eye, through caverns of activity, up through the pillars that stretched into the sky.

Yet he extended even farther, his vision encompassing the White Star in orbit and stretching across the solar system; his direction controlling weapons, communications, substrates; his whispers running through legions of machine people; his will coordinating the attacks of fleets of shrieking ships.

All the Shadows' systems and servants were a part of him, and as they turned to him for guidance, the pressure of that Shadow tech fell upon him, filling his body with a great, irresistible up rush of heat, igniting him to blazing perfection. The Eye showed him what he must do, aroused him with dark desires, revealed to him the profound and joyful truth of the First Principles.

Chaos through warfare.

Evolution through bloodshed.

Perfection through victory.

Chaos was the proper state of being, the state in which all impulse was freed to act.

Chaos was the way to strength.

Chaos was the engine powering life.

He must use the Eye to spread chaos so that potential could be released, promise realized. He must kill all who could be killed, because they were not fit. He must fight, must destroy, must win. For the greatest joy was the ecstasy of victory.

Amidst the new web that was forming, Wierden was a fading body of yellow, discarded, detached – a fleck of weakness in his brilliant, pulsing body. Somehow, he knew: She was dying. That was why he had been drawn here. To replace her. To run the Shadows' great machine.

It was so beautiful, so elegant. Perfect grace, perfect control, form and function integrated into the circuitry of the unbroken loop, the closed universe. All systems of the machine passed through him. He was its heart; he was its brain; he was the machine. He kept the machine people working in harmony. He synchronized the cleansing and circulation in sublime synergy. He beat out a flawless march with the complex, multileveled systems. The machine people were his flesh; the fingers of stone stretching up through the planet were his bones. He and the machine were one: the great heart of chaos and destruction. Burning with his dazzling, jaundiced light, he rejoiced in his strength, and in the inevitable downfall of the Vorlons and all who stood with them.

The hate echoed back to him, the echoes now a multitude, propagating within the system, his energy surging, blazing, raging. He wanted to destroy. Destruction was the one thing at which he excelled. In fact, he had come here to destroy... something. What was it? If only he could remember, he could begin the destruction.

He searched for his mind-focusing exercises, found them still there, among the thousands of pieces of information flowing through him. He drew toward them, to that part of himself squeezed in the grip of control, progressing through the orderly numbers, and the letters, and the words that kept out anything that threatened his equilibrium. Within them he would find the answer.

He added another exercise, and another, narrowing his concentration, blocking out the Shadow ships, the machine people, the planet around him, the pressure and the darkness and the hate, telescoping his attention on this one body, on this one moment, on the task that he had forgotten.

There was a countdown in his mind. Eleven seconds. Ten. The White Star. The Eye must be destroyed. He was the Eye. He focused on himself, visualized the one-term equation. There was no echo from the tech, no crushing pressure of energy falling upon him. His tech was still functioning, the brilliant yellow pulsing through him, but something was obstructing the spell. The machine would not allow him to harm it.

Galen focused on one of the machine people beside him, visualized the equation again. Nothing. The great machine pulled at him, requiring his full attention. He could feel himself coordinating, processing. He was losing his independence, being made into a piece of something larger – perhaps the controlling piece, but still a piece that was itself under control.

Had he come all this way only to serve at the center of the Shadows' place of power? Wierden's faint yellow body was fading into blackness.

Angrily, he focused on it, performed an electron incantation. The tech echoed the spell. He chose as his setting a simple white room. Then he found himself standing within it, outside of space and time. At five seconds, he had suspended the countdown. A pillar of stone etched with runes of light ran up through the center of the room. But Wierden was not there.

"Show yourself!" Galen said, his anger growing.

He had once been foolish enough to design a tribute to her, at its center her image: stiff golden wings that hung in folds from her arms, long tapered fingers, dark skin around her eyes that had always struck him as sad.

A faint whispering reached him. In a few seconds, he identified it. The words of the Code, in the language of the Taratimude, repeated again and again. A traditional mind-focusing exercise. What could the Code mean to her, source of the Shadows' pestilence?

Galen traced the sound to the pillar. After a thousand years at the center of the Eye, this was her self-image.

"Wierden. How could you serve the Shadows? How could you coordinate their attacks? How could you enslave their prisoners?"

"I am sorry," the pillar said, in words that he somehow understood.

"Your apology is meaningless. Tell me how to destroy the Eye."

"There is no way to destroy it."

"If I destroy myself."

"There is no way to destroy yourself."

"Then tell me how to make it follow my commands. How do I control it?"

"You do not control it," Wierden said. "It controls you."

"Have you even tried? Have you even fought them? Or were you in league with them all along?"

"Your anger is the Shadows'. I have felt it for a thousand years. Only now, as I die, do they give me a moment's peace. Yet what peace can I have, after all I have done?"

"And what have you done?"

"I was the first of my people to accept the Shadow implants. The first of many. We did not know their nature. We did not know they were programmed for chaos and destruction. Some took them hoping to improve our lives and planet. Others took them for power or personal gain. Whatever our motives, the result was chaos. In our great war-frenzy, we fell upon one another until our planet was destroyed and all but a handful of the Taratimude were killed.

"Only then did I realize what the Shadows had given us. Beings of other species began to take the implants, and again chaos grew. These new mages built empires, killed one another for them. Yet I believed that, properly trained, we could do good. We could suppress the programming of the Shadows. With the few surviving Taratimude, I began a formal order. It would be run by a Circle of five, and follow a Code of seven principles. By exposing the destructive nature of the implants to the other mages, and revealing the fate of the Taratimude, we gradually convinced many to join us.

"Still, some did not want to follow our discipline. And the Shadows were not pleased with our Code. Eventually I was betrayed, by some of our own order."

Just as he had been.

"I was caught, captured, brought to this place. When I realized what they meant to do with me, I no longer tried to escape. I realized that the mages would never be safe and free, so long as the Shadows had power. I believed that I could take control of their great machine, and either destroy it or use it to protect the mages. That was my mistake.

"The machine is too strong. It is programmed with such powerful desires – conflict, chaos, cruelty, destruction, victory – that it cannot be resisted. I struggled to control it, as I controlled my tech, but the Eye is not designed that way; it does not allow domination.

"It does require of its nexus strong will, consciousness, mental discipline. One of their conditioned machine components cannot run it. But the will of the nexus is directed toward the ends of the Shadows.

"I fought it. I tried to prevent myself from allowing the Shadow signals through me. I could not. I was lost within it, a mechanism for coordination and processing at its center. Within a few minutes of joining with the Eye, I could no longer even form the thought to fight it. I wanted only to do the Shadows' bidding, to run the machine. The programming controlled me."

He had not lasted even a few seconds.

"I hid what little part of me I could deep inside, holding to it through mind-focusing exercises over days and years and centuries, watching with horror all that I did. Yet that piece did me no good. It was helpless to act.

"The machine has extended my life as long as possible. But finally, my body has failed, and I will have my freedom. Now your bondage must begin."

The glowing pillar fell silent.

Wierden was the greatest of all the mages. Her control was legendary. She had fought the Eye as best she could. If she could not resist its directives, then how could he? Her silence seemed to carry the answer. There was no resisting it.

The Shadows, through their systems and technology, imposed control, demanded obedience. The Eye, the Shadow ships, the machine people – all were forced to follow their programming and the will of their masters.

The Vorlons, Galen realized, were no different. Perhaps they enslaved no separate sentient beings at the centers of their ships, but with their organic technology, the ships themselves were alive, were sentient.

Galen had felt it. Ulkesh's ship had been created to be a happy slave, obeying his orders without question. The Vorlon ships obeyed the Vorlons' orders, just as the Shadow ships obeyed the Shadows' orders. Just as Galen's ship obeyed his. With the techno-mages, the Shadows had created their most chaotic machines. That was how the mages had slipped out of their control.

Yet even then, the mages unknowingly mimicked their creators. They too sought to manipulate, to control, to impose their designs on the universe. They created ships and places of power that unquestioningly followed their orders. The relationship between the Eye and Anna was little different from that between a techno-mage and his tech: One imposed control on the other. It was a chain of master and slave, puppet-master and puppet.

He had been the master. He had controlled his tech, himself, every step of the way. And it had brought him here, to slavery. Control of the Eye was not possible. And control of himself would only make him a more efficient cog in the Shadows' war machine. But if he could not control it, then he would be controlled by it. There were no other options.

The pillar's light faded, and with the strange knowledge of dreams, he knew Wierden was passing. He grabbed on to the cold stone with both hands.

"Please tell me what to do. Tell me what to do."

She had no answers. In a thousand years, she had not found escape. And now he would serve the next thousand, spreading chaos and death. John would be killed, the alliance would fail, the Shadows would ascend, and Elizar and Razeel would rebuild the mages in blood. The light died.

He stood there, at a loss. From the rock, a faint tingling prickled through his fingertips, like the smallest electric current. With a wave of goose bumps it shivered up his hands and arms to his head. There it conveyed longing, sadness, relief. Then it was gone. The pillar faded, disappeared. It was nearly the same thing he'd felt when Elric had died.

Galen shivered, crossing his arms over his chest. He had not wanted to think of it then. Yet here it was again. What was it? Some residual bit of energy. An echo of an echo of an echo – of something. In both cases he'd been within an electron incantation, a communication spell that, through unknown means, allowed two minds to meet on a dreamlike inner landscape. But if the person with whom he communicated died, then whose emotions was he sensing?

As he'd been ripping through the moss for Elric, he'd believed for a moment, when the tingling ran through him, that he had somehow sensed Elric, in his passing. As Galen thought about it now, he knew that was not so. He knew Elric better than anyone, and what he'd sensed was not Elric. Though Elric might have felt regret, a desire to continue, the emotions Galen had sensed were somehow too simple, too basic to arise from Elric.

And now, with Wierden, the feelings were slightly different, yet still they carried the same simplicity, purity. As unlikely as it seemed, he could think of only one possibility – that he was receiving some impression from their tech, its life lasting a few moments longer than its host's, the channel of communication lingering.