“Of course it would exist! Not as a mind, that’s all. Mind is impossible without neural qualities—communication between separate nodes that either contradict or confirm. If we think correctly, a domain of order would reach completion within the first few seconds of existence, freezing everything. It would grasp and control all the energy of its beginning moment, work through all possible variations in an instant—become a monobloc, still and perfected, timeless. Not eternal—eviternal, frozen forever. Timeless.”
“Our universe, our domain, could spin on for many billions or even trillions more years,” Karn continued. “In our universe, there could very well be a Final Mind, the summing up of all neural processes throughout all time. But Deirdre Enoch found an abomination. If it were a mind, think of it! Instantly creating all things, never being contradicted, never knowing. Nothing has ever frustrated it, stopped it, trained or tamed it. It would be as immature as a newborn baby, and as sophisticated—”
“And ingenious,” Rasp chimed in.
“—As the very devil,” Karn finished.
“Please,” Rasp finished, her voice suddenly quiet. “Even if such a thing is possible, let it not be a mind.”
For the past million kilometers, they had passed over a scourged, scrubbed segment of the Way. In driving back the Jarts from their strongholds, tens of thousands of Way defenders had died. The Way had been altered by the released energies of the battle and still glowed slightly, shot through with pulsing curls and rays, while the flaw in this region transported them with a barely noticeable roughness. The flawship could compensate some, but even with this compensation, they had reduced their speed to a few thousand kilometers an hour.
The Redoubt lay less than ten thousand kilometers ahead.
Rasp and Karn removed their clavicles from their boxes and tried as best they could to interpret the state of the Way as they came closer to the Redoubt.
Five thousand kilometers from the Redoubt, evidence of immense constructions lined the wall of the Way: highways, bands connecting what might have been linked gates; yet there were no gates. The constructions had been leveled to narrow lanes of rubble, like lines of powder.
Olmy shook his head, dismayed. “Nothing is the way it was reported to be just a few weeks ago.”
“I detect something unusual, too,” Rasp said. Karn agreed. “Something related to the Jart offensive…”
“Something we weren’t told about?” Plass wondered. “A colony that failed?”
“Ours, or Jart?” Olmy asked.
“Neither,” Karn said, looking up from her clavicle. She lifted the device, a fist-sized sphere mounted on two handles, and rotated the display for Olmy and Plass to see. Olmy had watched gate openers perform before, and knew the workings of the display well enough—though he could never operate a clavicle. “There have never been gates opened here. This is all sham.”
“A decoy,” Plass said.
“Worse,” Rasp said. “The gate at the Redoubt is twisting probabilities, sweeping world-lines within the Way to such an extreme…The residue of realities that never were are being deposited.”
“Murmurs in the Way’s sleep, nightmares in our unhistory,” Karn said. For once, the twins seemed completely subdued, even disturbed. “I don’t see how we can function if we’re incorporated into such a sweep.”
“So what is this?” Olmy asked, pointing to the smears of destroyed highways, cities, bands between the ghosts of gates.
“A future,” Karn said. “Maybe what will happen if we fail…”
“But these patterns aren’t like human construction,” Plass observed. “No human city planner would lay out those roadways. Nor does it match anything we know about the Jarts.”
Olmy looked more closely, frowned in concentration. “If someone else had created the Way,” he said, “maybe this would be their ruins, the rubble of their failure.”
Karn gave a nervous laugh. “Wonderful!” she said. “All we could have hoped for! If we open a gate here, what could possibly happen?”
Plass grabbed Olmy’s arm. “Put it in our transmitted record. Tell the Hexamon this part of the Way must be forbidden. No gates should be opened here, ever!”
“Why not?” Karn said. “Think what could be learned. The new domains.”
“I agree with Ser Plass,” Rasp said. “It’s possible there are worse alternatives than finding a universe of pure order.” She let go of her clavicle and grabbed her head. “Even touching our instruments here causes pain. We are useless…any gate we open would consume us more quickly than the gate at the Redoubt! You must agree, sister!”
Karn was stubborn. “I don’t see it,” she said. “I simply don’t. I think this could be very interesting. Fascinating, even.”
Plass sighed. “This is the box that Konrad Korzenowski has opened for us,” she said for Olmy’s benefit. “Spoiled genius children drawn to evil like insects to a corpse.”
“I thought evil was related to disorder,” Olmy said.
“Already, you know better,” Plass rejoined.
Rasp turned her eyes on Olmy and Plass, eyes narrow and full of uncomfortable speculation.
Olmy reached out and grasped Rasp’s clavicle to keep it from bumping into the flawship bulkheads. Karn took charge of the instrument indignantly and thrust it back at her sister. “You forget your responsibility,” she chided. “We can fear this mission, or we can engage it with joy and spirit,” she said. “Cowering does none of us any good.”
“You’re right, sister, about that at least,” Rasp said. She returned her clavicle to its box and straightened her clothing, then used a cloth to wipe her face. “We are, after all, going to a place where we have always gone, always will go.”
“It’s what happens when we get there that is always changing,” Karn said.
Plass’s face went white. “My husband never returns the same way, in the same condition,” she said. “How many hells does he experience?”
“One for each of him,” Rasp said. “Only one. It is different husbands who return.”
Though there had never been such this far along the way, Olmy saw the scattered wreckage of Jart fortifications, demolished, dead and empty. Beyond them lay a region where the Way was covered with winding black and red bands of sand, an immense serpentine desert, also unknown. Olmy felt a spark of something reviving, if not a wish for life, then an appreciation of what extraordinary sights his life had brought him.
On Lamarckia, he had seen the most extraordinary variations on biology. Here, near the Redoubt, it was reality itself subject to its own flux, its own denial.
Plass was transfixed. “The next visitors, if any, will see something completely different,” she said. “We’ve been caught up in a sweeping world-line of the Way, not necessarily our own.”
“I would never have believed it possible,” Rasp said, and Karn reluctantly agreed. “This is not the physics we were taught.”
“It can make any physics it wishes,” Plass said. “Any reality. It has all the energy it needs. It has human minds to teach it our variations.”
“It knows only unity,” Karn said, taking hold of Plass’s shoulder.
The older woman did not seem to mind. “It knows no will stronger than its own,” she said. “Yet it may divide its will into illusory units. It is a tyrant…” Plass pointed to the winding sands, stretching for thousands of kilometers beneath them. “This is a moment of calm, of steady concentration. If my memories are correct, if what my husband’s returning self…selves…tell me, is correct, it is usually much more frantic. Much more inventive.”
Karn made a face and placed her hands on the bars of her clavicle. She rubbed the grips and her face became tight with concentration. “I feel it. There is still a lesion…”
Rasp took hold of her own instrument and went into her own state. “It’s still there,” she agreed. “It’s bad. It floats above the Way, very near the flaw. From below, it must look like some sort of bale star…”
They pass
ed through a fine bluish mist that rose from the northern end of the desert. The flawship made a faint belling sound. The mist passed behind.
“There,” Plass said. “No mistaking it!”
The gate pushed through the Way by Issa Danna had expanded and risen above the floor, just as Rasp and Karn had felt in their instruments. Now, at a distance of a hundred kilometers, they could see the spherical lesion clearly. It did indeed resemble a dark sun, or a chancre. A glow of pigeon’s blood flicked around it, the red of rubies and enchantment. The black center, less than the width of a fingertip at this distance, perversely seemed to fill Olmy’s field of vision.
His young body decided it was time to be very reluctant to proceed. He swallowed and brought this fear under control, biting his cheek until blood flowed.
The flawship lurched. Its voice told Olmy, “We have received an instructional beacon. There is a place held by humans less than ten kilometers away. They say they will guide us to safety.”
“It’s still there!” Plass said.
They all looked down through the flawship’s transparent nose, away from the lurid pink of the flaw, through layers of blue and green haze wrapped around the Way, down twenty-five kilometers to a single dark, gleaming steel point in the center of a rough, rolling land.
The Redoubt lay in the shadow of the lesion, surrounded by a penumbral twilight suffused with the flickering red of the lesion’s halo.
“I can feel the whipping hairs of other world-lines,” Karn and Rasp said together. Olmy glanced back and saw their clavicles touching sphere to sphere. The spheres crackled and clacked. Karn twisted her instrument toward Olmy so that he could see the display. A long list of domain “constants”—pi, Planck’s constant, others—varied with a regular humming in the flawship hull. “Nothing is stable out there!”
Olmy glanced at the message sent from the Redoubt. It provided navigation instructions for their flawship’s landing craft: how to disengage from the flawship, descend, undergo examination, and be taken into the pyramid. The message concluded, “We will determine whether you are illusions or aberrations. If you are from our origin, we will welcome you. It is too late to return now. Abandon your flawship before it approaches any closer to the all thing. Whoever sent you has committed you to our own endless imprisonment.”
“Cheerful enough,” Olmy said. The ghastly light cast a fitful, abbatoir glow on their faces.
“We have always gone there,” Rasp said quietly.
“We have to agree,” Plass said. “We have no other place to go.”
They tracted aft to the lander’s hatch and climbed into the small, arrowhead-shaped craft. Its interior welcomed them by fitting to their forms, providing couches, instruments, tailored to their bodies. Plass sat beside Olmy in the cockpit, Rasp and Karn directly behind them.
Olmy disengaged from the flawship and locked the lander onto the pyramid’s beacon. They dropped from the flawship. The landscape steadily grew in the broad cockpit window.
Plass’s face crumpled, like a child about to break into tears. “Star, Fate, and Pneuma, be kind. I see the opener’s head. There!” She pointed in helpless dread, equally horrified and fascinated by something so inconceivable.
On a low, broad rise in the shadowed land surrounding the Redoubt, a huge dark head rose like an upright mountain, its skin like gray stone, one eye turned toward the south, the other watching over the territory before the nearest face of the pyramid. This watchful eye was easily a hundred meters wide, and glowed a dismal sea green, throwing a long beam through the thick twisted ropes of mist. Plass’s voice became shrill. “Oh Star and Fate…”
The landscape around the Redoubt rippled beneath the swirling rays of rotating world-lines, spreading like hair from the black center of the lesion, changing the land a little with each pass, moving the bizarre landmarks a few dozen meters this way or that, increasing them in size, reducing them.
Olmy could never have imagined such a place. The Redoubt sat within a child’s nightmare of disembodied human limbs, painted over the hills like trees, their fingers grasping and releasing spasmodically. At the top of one hill stood a kind of castle made of blocks of green glass, with a single huge door and window. Within the door stood a figure—a statue, perhaps—several hundred meters high, vaguely human, nodding steadily, idiotically, as the lander passed over. Hundreds of much smaller figures, gigantic nevertheless, milled in a kind of yard before the castle, their red and black shadows flowing like capes in the lee of the constant wind of changing probabilities. Olmy thought they might be huge dogs, or tailless lizards, but Plass pointed, and said, “My husband told me about an assistant to Issa Danna named Ram Chako…Duplicated, forced to run on all fours.”
The giant in the castle door slowly raised its huge hand, and the massive lizards scrambled over each other to run from an open portal in the yard. They leaped up as the lander passed overhead, as if they would snap it out of the air with hideous jaws.
Olmy’s head throbbed. He could not bring himself out of a conviction that none of this could be real; indeed, there was no necessity for it to be real in any sense his body understood. For their part, Rasp and Karn had lost all their earlier bravado and clung to each other, their clavicles floating on tethers wrapped around their wrists.
The lurid glare of the halo flowed like blood into the cabin as the lander rotated to present points of contact for traction fields from the Redoubt. Olmy instructed the ship to present a wide-angle view of the Redoubt and the land, and this view revolved slowly around them, filling the lander’s cramped interior.
The perverse variety seemed never to end. Something had dissected not only a human body, or many bodies, and wreaked hideous distortions on its parts, but had done the same with human thoughts and desires, planting the results over the region with no obvious design.
Within the low valley—as described by the female visitant—a large blue-skinned woman, the equal of the figure in the doorway of the castle, crouched near a cradle within which churned hundreds of naked humans. She slowly dropped her hand into the cauldron of flesh and stirred, and her hair sprayed out from her head with a sullen cometary glow, casting everything in a syrupy, heavy green luminosity.
“Mother of geometries,” Karn muttered, and hid her eyes.
Olmy could not turn away, but everything in him wanted to go to sleep, to die, rather than to acknowledge what they were seeing.
Plass saw his distress. Somehow she took strength from the incomprehensible view. “It does not need to make sense,” she said with the tone of a chiding schoolteacher. “It’s supported by infinite energy and a monolithic, mindless will. There is nothing new here, nothing—”
“I’m not asking that it make sense,” Olmy said. “I need to know what’s behind it.”
“A sufficient force, channeled properly, can create anything a mind can imagine—” Karn began.
“More than any mind will imagine. Not a mind like our minds,” Rasp restated. “A unity, not a mind at all.”
For a moment, Olmy’s anger lashed and he wanted to shout his frustration, but he took a deep breath, folded his arms where he floated in tracting restraints, and said to Plass, “A mind that has no goals? If there’s pure order here—”
Karn broke in, her voice high and sweet, singing. “Think of the dimensions of order. There is mere arrangement, the lowest form of order, without motive or direction. Next comes self-making, when order can convert resources into more of itself, propagating order. Then comes creation, self-making reshaping matter into something new. But when creation stalls, when there is no mind, just force, it becomes mere elaboration, an endless spiral of rearrangement of what has been created. What do we see down there? Empty elaboration. Nothing new. No understanding.”
“She shows some wisdom,” Plass acknowledged grudgingly. “But the allthing still must exist.”
“And all this…elaboration?” Olmy asked.
“Spoiled by deathlessness,” Plass said, “by never-ending su
pplies of resources. Never freshened by the new, at its core. Order without death, art without critic or renewal, the final mind of a universe where only riches exist, only joy is possible, never knowing disappointment.”
The lander shuddered again and again as they dropped toward the pyramid. Its inertial control systems could not cope with the sweeping rays of different world-lines.
“Sounds like a spoiled child,” Olmy said.
“Far worse,” Karn said. “We’re like spoiled children, Rasp and I. Willful and maybe a little silly. Humans are silly, childish, always learning, full of failure. Out there—beyond the lesion, reaching through it…”
“Perpetual success,” Rasp mocked. “Ultimate and mature. It cannot learn. Only rearrange.”
“Deirdre Enoch was never content with limitations,” Plass said, looking to Olmy for sympathy. “She went searching for what heaven would really be.” Her eyes glittered with her emotion—exaltation brought on by too much fear and dismay.
“Maybe she found it,” Karn said.
5
“I can’t welcome you,” Deirdre Enoch said, walking heavily toward them. Behind Olmy, within a chamber high in the Redoubt, near the tip of the steel pyramid, the lander sighed and settled into its cradle.
Olmy tried to compare this old woman with the portraits of Enoch in the records. Her voice was much the same, though deeper, and almost without emotion.
Rasp, Karn, and Plass stood beside Olmy as Enoch approached. Behind Enoch, in the lambency of soft amber lights spaced around the base of the chamber, wavered a line of ten other men and women, all of them old, all dressed in black, with silver ribbons hanging from the tops of their white-haired heads. “You’ve come to a place of waiting where nothing is resolved. Why come at all?”
Before Olmy could answer, Enoch smiled, her deeply wrinkled face seeming to crack with the unfamiliar expression. “We assume you are here because you think the Jarts could become involved.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Olmy said, his voice hoarse. “I recognize you, but none of the others…”