‘Are you sure of that?’
Chaline frowned at him. ‘As sure as I can be. Why are you digging at this?’
‘Never mind. You set up the runcible.’
‘We did—after Lucifer demonstrated a knowledge of runcible technology he could only have acquired in the Polity. It was he who suggested a time-inconsistent runcible. We thought he didn’t understand how dangerous that could be. But he understood perfectly. His people were dead, wiped out by a technology that spreads like a virus, and he wanted to innoculate that particular area of space.’ She stared at Cormac, waiting for some comment or question. When none was forthcoming she continued, ‘We chose a barren and untouched moon circling a gas giant—the only planet in orbit of a nearby white dwarf. Other suns lay under a light year away and we were near to the centre of the Maker realm. We landed the Victoria—a difficult enough task in itself. I set up the runcible and we cannibalized the ship’s U-space engine for the parts to make that runcible time inconsistent. Lucifer provided some esoteric tech to enable us to fine tune things and boost the power from the fusion reactors we dismounted. We were running alignment tests when—’
‘One moment,’ Cormac interrupted, ‘you need an AI to run a runcible. I’d have thought that requirement even more critical in this situation.’
‘Yes… obviously we’d brought a runcible AI, in stasis, along with us.’
‘It sacrificed itself to get you back here?’
Chaline stared off to one side for a moment, then turned back to Cormac. ‘Yes, it did. You see, it could have escaped through its own runcible, but that would mean that runcible shutting down before the one on Celedon, which in turn would mean the energy of the time-inconsistent link coming this way rather than going that way. We could not have escaped it, nor would something in the region of a hundred billion other human beings.’
On hearing that Cormac kept his mouth closed—the figure was worthy of a respectful silence.
Chaline continued, ‘We initiated the runcible AI before agreeing to Lucifer’s scheme, and it instantly concurred. Just one of those Jain nodes is hideously dangerous, as you know. Here was a chance to turn trillions of them to ash.’
‘What came through the runcible after you?’
‘As I was saying: we were running the alignment tests when another of those Maker ships appeared. I put together the information package and sent it through to Celedon and, to us, at our end, full connection was instantly accepted. Things would have been mighty shitty for us then if it had been rejected.’
‘You chose Celedon because of its remoteness?’
‘Exactly. And we meanwhile knew, or rather Graham knew, hostile protocol Starfire would be instituted. We thought we’d have time to get all our stuff together, but things U-jumped down into the base we’d built.’ Chaline winced.
‘Things?’
‘Creatures… check the download and you can see what they were like. Only a proton blast would take any of them down. I saw one take apart Villaeus. The horrible thing about that was that it didn’t just rip him apart to kill him; it was obviously very quickly taking him apart and analysing those parts. As we retreated to the runcible, they just kept killing us. Lucifer then started using some weapon I’d never seen before—it seemed to create a collapsing gravity field in whatever he aimed it at. He broke out of his Golem then, in full glass dragon mode, and held them off while we went through. He told us all he would not be joining us…’
Cormac leant back. ‘Why not?’
‘To give us the time to get away, and because he did not want to survive his own kind.’
‘That’s how Lucifer felt?’
‘Yes,’ Chaline said staring at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Like the dreams—there’s that telepathic link. Lucifer would have been under some stress then, and not shielding himself from you so well…’
‘There was a lot of stuff. We were all “under some stress”. I felt anguish, and incredible anger—I don’t know how much of it was my own.’
‘Anything else?’
‘He felt guilty. We’d brought him home and because of that put ourselves in such danger. Many of us died. I guess the guilt was understandable.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, standing. ‘I think it’s time for me to look at those downloads now.’
Chaline remained in her seat, watching him go. Once he was through the shimmer-shield and the irised door closed behind him, he asked, ‘How moral a creature was Lucifer, do you think?’
‘Neither more nor less than any human being, I would suggest,’ replied Jerusalem.
‘So the Makers were “consolidating”, and they’d also sent an organic probe, which later named itself Dragon, to the Milky Way. I reckon they were getting ready for a massive expansion.’
‘That would seem plausible.’
‘And they’d been working with Jain tech for some time…’
‘So it would seem. Coincidental that during the expansion of the Polity we found nothing but the mere remnants of Jain technology. Then, within a few decades of the Maker’s arrival and Dragon’s dramatic reaction to that arrival, a working Jain node somehow ended up in the hands of a biophysicist quite capable of knowing how to use it.’
‘I think we need to have a long talk with Dragon.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ replied Jerusalem.
The soil under his feet was a deep umber, scattered with nodules of dark green moss and speared by the occasional sprout of adapted tundra grass. Some growth clung to rock faces and exposed boulders in defiance of the dusty gales that scoured here twice each Martian year. However, the red hue of Mars was discernible in this place as in few others now. Horace Blegg walked to the edge of a declivity that descended in tiers and steep slopes for five miles. Far down in Valles Marineris there seemed the gleam of some vast still lake. It was no lake, however, but the chainglass ceiling of the Greenhouse, which had been the first step in an early terraforming project and now contained forested parks. How things had changed during Blegg’s enormously long life.
Cormac believed Blegg to be something created by Earth Central—an avatar of that entity—and not really an immortal survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear detonation. However, Blegg knew himself to once have been a boy called Hiroshi who walked out of that inferno. A boy who grew into a man with the ability to transport himself through U-space. A man who could turn inner vision on his body and had learned how to change its appearance at will, just as he had so many times changed his name. At the time when they built that edifice on the shore of Lake Geneva to house the Earth Central AI, he was calling himself Horace Blegg, and so he remained ever since that entity woke for the first time and perceived him.
‘So, Hal, let’s talk scenarios,’ Blegg said abruptly.
After a pause, when there came no reply, he gazed in a direction few other humans could perceive, and stepped there. Mars faded around him, and momentarily he existed in a realm without colour, distance, or even time. Then he was pacing towards a runcible gateway on that same world, curious faces turned towards him. He ignored them, stepped through. Another transit lounge, gravity even lighter and his steps bouncing. He located himself, then transported himself again into a very secure chamber in the Tranquillity Museum on Earth’s moon.
At the centre of this chamber rested a hemispherical chainglass case covering innocuous looking coralline objects. The column this case rested on he knew contained a CTD—Contra Terrene Device—the euphemistic term for an antimatter weapon. The chamber he stood in also sat on top of a fusion drive. In an instant Earth Central could cause this chamber to be ejected intact from the museum and, when it was a safe distance from the moon, detonate the weapon it contained. Blegg turned, eyeing the display screens ringing the walls. They all showed recorded microscopic and nanoscopic views of the objects within the case—only a few of the millions of images available, though subscreens could be called up to gain access to a huge body of data concerning the complex molecular machinery revealed. However, this chamber was closed to the public now—had been closed for some years.