The Ascendant Stars (61 page)

‘Okay, we’ve established that you’re screaming mad,’ Julia said in a hoarse whisper. ‘What new outburst of vileness are you going to show me?’

‘Hmm, you’ve got feisty since we last met.’ Talavera chuckled but her eyes glittered. ‘What you don’t know is that all this constitutes an act of rational purpose. There is an ecology of greatness in the cosmos – evolution has many directions and only the greatest can defy the currents of dissolution. That’s what this is about, and you are privileged to be a witness … ’

She broke off as a Henkayan carrying three weapons appeared at the end of the round passageway.

‘We have him,’ it said gruffly.

‘Bring him to me.’

Talavera laughed as her minion left, a high girlish sound that, Julia recalled, usually presaged a deed of outstanding cruelty.

‘It’s a shame you didn’t let me know you were coming,’ Talavera said. ‘I’d have had drinks and snacks arranged, sweet lights and sweet music.’ She raised her hands dramatically. ‘But – at least my cherished travelling companions are here with me to celebrate this historical event … dearest Kao Chih! Do join us.’

The barrel-chested, four-armed Henkayan had returned with a Human, a black-haired, youthful male in a dull orange two-piece. The man’s hands were bound behind his back, his features were Asiatic and he had a bruised jaw and a split lip. As the Henkayan steered him along the passage Talavera brought out a chair and pointed at it. The man was prodded towards it and shoved down into a seated position. Talavera grinned and patted his cheek.

‘Right, first introductions. Julia, this is Kao Chih; Kao Chih – Julia. I’ve spent some time with both of you, and finally we’ve got
the whole gang together in the one place!’ She smiled. ‘Did you miss me, KC? Remember all the fun we had?’

‘I have not forgotten you, Mistress Talavera.’

Talavera glanced at Julia and rolled her eyes. ‘Mistress! Always so polite, the Chinese. Even when they’re stabbing you in the back – isn’t that right, KC? After all, that’s what you did back in the Shafis system, when you abandoned me on that miserable scumpot of a planet.’ She had been poking his shoulder as she spoke but then stopped. ‘And yet if I hadn’t been dumped there I might never have encountered my master’s servants and heard his message and his promise … ’

As she spoke, the smoky black snake creatures appeared from below, winding their way up her body. Julia stared, remembering their name – vermax – and wondered if they were actually even organic creatures.

‘ … and we wouldn’t be here today to honour and mark the occasion of His arrival.’

She pointed a small control remote at one of the consoles and a large holopanel winked on above it. The image was divided into eight subframes showing cycles of visual feeds from the hundreds of sensors dotted around the exterior of the Great Hub. Against the looming, striated hyperspace background, ships fought in sideslipping, glancing encounters. Some of the sensors were tracking the participants and Julia saw black curvilinear ships of the Vor lash out with bright tentacles to attack smaller vessels shaped like bulbous argopods, the shell-squids that populated the waters of the Eastern Towns. Others showed similar clashes involving the argopod ships and fast darting craft with tapered prows and bullet-shaped sterns.

‘The Construct just doesn’t know when to give in,’ said Talavera. ‘Keeps throwing ships into a lost cause, keeps wasting its forces. Even when the Godhead Himself enters the arena.’

The eight subframes merged, dissolved into a single image. It looked like a strange landscape seen from above at something like a 20-degree angle. The ground was a gleaming swirl of silver-grey and slate-blue shot through with strands of black, like
something stirred or kneaded. As Julia watched she could see that the blue-grey surface was in motion, undulations passing across it. The image pulled back and the restless expanse widened, and curious solid-looking outlines appeared as if pushing up out of something glutinous and malleable. Sections of strange structures emerged, domes, triangular obelisks, then they would twist and distort into something completely different, odd creatures struggling across the grey ripples before collapsing back in, or bizarre body parts, a winged arm, a foot, a brace of tails, and a huge face that surfaced, gazed up with blank eyes for a moment before tipping over and sliding back in.

The image pulled back and the details shrank into a general dark grey amalgam. At last its upper edge came into view along with more ships, big black domelike ones and silvery diamonds around which flocks of smaller craft swooped. When the full extent of the grotesque immensity became apparent, it resembled a vast ragged island with an underside so notched, craggy and serrated it might have been wrenched whole from the bedrock of some malformed planet.

‘Meet the Godhead!’ Talavera said. ‘In all his irresistible glory!’

The empathic entity, the Godhead’s dislocated conscience, used its drone to attach protective frameworks to the head and foot of Robert’s couch. Essential nutrient and medication sacs were taped to the underframe and most of his monitor wires were removed. Then suspensors in the frameworks were activated and the drone steered him out of the small grey room and into a passage that sloped downwards in a straight line for quite a distance.

‘Could you summarise what we’re doing again?’ Robert said as he floated downwards. ‘Especially the part about how we defeat the Godhead with his own dreams. You see, the more you repeat it to me the more confident I’ll feel about the undertaking as a whole.’

‘Very well,’ said the empathic entity via its drone. ‘There is a specific area of the Godhead’s brain where sleep imperatives and symbolic memories continuously entwine, which over time I’ve come to call the dream gyrus. The Godhead never wholly gives itself over to sleep but it does allow selected areas of the cortex to slip into the dream state as an aid to neural repair and low-level cognitive indexing.

‘Once we reach the dream gyrus you and I shall co-interface with the localised synaptic web and force the Godhead’s awareness into the sleep/dream state. Then with your memories of the Tanenth homeworld we will compel it to accept its guilt and remorse and thereby persuade it to abandon the multi-missile launch. So – do you feel more confident now?’

‘Not especially,’ Robert said. ‘Although I can say that I’ve not been overly discouraged.’

‘Glad I could be of service.’

From a regular passageway their route turned into a twisting tunnel whose walls looked oddly organic in shape but stone-grey in colour and surface texture. The tunnel turned and curved through some hairpin bends that were a challenge to negotiate but eventually they reached an easier section which widened, opening out. At this point the empathic entity’s drone remote halted and it spoke to Robert.

‘We are about to enter the dream gyrus,’ it said. ‘What you called the meta-quantal flux is strong here so do not be surprised by anything that you see, or even think that you see. Once we co-interface with the synaptic web we will be able to exert a measure of control and counter any troublesome manifestations.’

Robert gave a puzzled frown then bit his lip as the couch knocked against a jutting curve of tunnel floor, causing a passing twinge of pain.

Further on they reached a wide, long, low-ceilinged cavern where the floor was uneven and where tapering hummocks formed rough columns with ceiling protrusions. This was all visible through long glowing veils that trembled or flickered, but as they moved forward into the cavern Robert saw that the veils were streams of pale images rushing up and down between ceiling and floor. Occasionally he caught glimpses of himself on the river, in the hammer giant’s cave, in the auditorium with the crowd of Rosas.
Is this where the Godhead’s experiences are recycled as dreams, or does it dream all the time?

‘A close approximation,’ said the empathic entity when Robert voiced his theory. ‘The Godhead’s dream-state is a continual thought process which he can voluntarily enter or use and from which he exiled me so long ago. It is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.’ The drone had brought the suspensor-couch to a halt. From its upper disc a pair of jointed arms unfolded, holding between them a frail-looking mesh cap. ‘We are at the centre of the dream gyrus, Robert Horst – shall we commence?’

Robert drew a deep breath. ‘I think we should, while I still have some optimism left.’

The empathic entity made no reply as it slipped the mesh cap over his head. Something sparkled at the centre of Robert’s field of vision and radiated outwards. Suddenly all the vague images became sharp, at least the slower-moving, more complete ones did. There was a layered hierarchy of sights and sounds, important ones that were focused, detailed and often in full colour, secondary ones that drifted in and out of the translucent background, and peripheral monochrome ones that formed sequences of snapshots, strong and expressive moments that came and went, often repeating.

Just then the central image was of a circular passageway cluttered with consoles along one side and couches along the other while a short woman with curly black hair spoke with someone on one of the couches, also a woman. He was mildly startled as he recognised them from the auditorium – the woman on the couch was Julia while the other was Talavera. Engrossed, he wondered if the cloud of secondary images were at all related.

‘Robert, you must clear your mind and revive your memories of the Tanenth and their world.’

He turned his head away, trying to recall his visit to that vast water cavern filled with that computer-run simulation of an entire world and its inhabitants. He saw again the AI machine, which the Tanenth made in their own image, a curious elongated squid-like being, and recalled the tour of that world, its cities and peoples all rendered in perfect detail. As the memories passed across his own mind’s eye they also flowed through the co-interface and into the Godhead’s dream-state. With every passing moment the world of the Tanenth extended itself throughout the dream gyrus and beyond.

‘What happens next?’ Robert said.

‘When this extrapolation from your memories reaches its visualisation limit I shall drive the boundaries of the dream gyrus outwards to encompass the Godhead’s conscious awareness, then … ’ The empathic entity paused and its drone rotated slowly. ‘Is this element part of your memories?’

All around them the squidlike Tanenth were gathering in a large circular paved area surrounded by round, squat buildings with flat, disc-shaped roofs. As Robert watched, the Tanenth passed glassy bulbs amongst themselves, drinking from them before passing them on. It took a minute or so for the poison to work, for the Tanenth to fall limply onto the paving stones.

‘I was shown scenes like this,’ Robert said, feeling shaken. ‘But from a distance, not this close.’

The mass suicide played out again and again in different settings, in a communal home, in some kind of factory, in an outdoor arena – it was the sight of hundreds of thousands of sentient creatures voluntarily ending their lives. Robert felt the tears burning on his cheeks.

‘Maybe these are sequences you were shown but have been unable to recover till now,’ the empathic entity said. ‘Or perhaps these memories are not yours, in which case … ’

Robert and the drone were now back in the circular gathering place. As the scene began to repeat itself, several larger beings identical to the Tanenth appeared and moved through the crowds, calling out with booming voices. These were the Advisers, the Godhead’s messengers, and as they spoke the Tanenth responded angrily and many arguments ensued.

‘This is not part of my memories,’ Robert said.

‘I know,’ said the drone. ‘All this time, despite the strenuous efforts to erase the emotional remainders, to exile me from his awareness and then to expunge me altogether, the memories still hung on, deeply, tenaciously buried – along with the guilt!’

Shafts of light angled down from above, falling upon the roiling, indignant crowd. The form that descended towards the startled onlookers was identical to the upright squid-likenesses of the Tanenth, except that it was huge and purest white.

‘He is here!’ the empathic entity said. ‘The dream-simulation is adapting – the Godhead has now become entangled in its own dream!’

‘Can we stop those missiles?’ Robert said.

‘The Godhead has relaxed his control over the external
communication channels … and other means of influence. As soon as we attempt to turn them to our purposes this will cause a ripple effect that will serve to bring the Godhead out of the dream-state. His subsequent displeasure is sure to be considerable.’

Robert laughed, despite the pain of the straps still keeping him in the couch. ‘Well, if he’s going to wake up angry, let’s give him something to be angry about!’

‘ … a long-delayed departure from an undeserving continuum,’ Talavera was saying as the long-range sensor cam roamed across the undulating ugliness of the Godhead’s exterior. ‘And the catalyst will be an event unprecedented on the galactic scale, the simultaneous creation of five hundred supernovae … ’

‘Genocide, you mean,’ Julia said. ‘The destruction of hundreds of worlds and civilisations. The slaughter of billions upon billions … ’

She froze in mid-sentence as a vermax snaked into her field of vision and lunged its eyeless, tapered head towards her, stopping just inches from her face, wavering there.