Agnosis – Ch. 15

<– Chapter 14 / Chapter 16 –>

Once again, Dorian and Amara assailed the mountains that crowded about the virtual Sonali, wending their way back along the path that had been provided for them to the bounce point. They left the city behind them, a blight on an otherwise pristine landscape, ever receding behind field and forest and flying ridge of digitized stone. Dorian was much more aware of sound this time: the flow of water tripping through narrow defiles and the call of anonymous birds, the quiet roar and creak of the wind through tree and leaf. The world had a voice, and everything it said rushed past his ears like an incomprehensible language. Except that he could comprehend it, if he chose. He could break it down to scripts and executables, object code and sub-routines that tumbled end to end like a fall of dominoes initiated by their own unconscious input strings. They were pebbles in a pond, setting off an endless chain of computational reactions that crashed against one another, counteracted, melded in patterns too complex for human analysis.

He mused upon these qualities of sound because Amara had spoken to him not at all since they had flipped out of geek in the basement of the virtual Archive, except for the minimum grunts and sighs when he left her no choice. He let her have her silence. He had horrified her with the things he had done. He understood that, even if he couldn’t help but resent it a little. It was just a render! And despite how apparently abhorrent his actions had been, they had both seen worse, he was certain. Environments devoted to human dissection, virtual orgies of necropheliac violence, open season hunting preserves where overstressed investment bankers unleashed their pent-up barbarous fantasies on friends and coworkers. These were all cottage industries of the imminently post-human Strand.

The difference was that those were fake experiences, detrimental only to impressionable young men with imperfectly de-engineered blood fetishes (if the outcry of their parents and assorted hysterical social watchdog groups were to be taken seriously). But the orb, the orb and all that it simulated, was something else entirely. For Amara, it was sacred. It was a seed of the One Truth that she was seeking, whatever that was. She believed, and by treating the orb’s functions as something other than a looking glass into Truth, he had defiled it.

He wasn’t sure exactly what it was that she had expected him to do, but he had obviously failed. And as a consequence, she had set up a wall between them that he couldn’t breach. After the fleeting experience of interconnection, of perfect harmony–or even the illusion of it–that they had shared outside the temple, he felt the rejection that much more poignantly. Having caressed a dream of her, he wanted to go on doing it forever, or at least believe that such a thing might be possible again.

So he was surprised as they scaled one of the few difficult ascents back to the summit of the mountain, working upward one at a time, she a few meters above him gripping handholds in the rock while he waited below pretending that he could catch her if she slipped, when she spoke to him. They had left the path a ways back and mutually decided to attempt a decently graded rock face rather than spend the few hundred meters to wind up and around it more gently. He was once more ruminating over the events at the temple, pondering where exactly he had gone wrong.

It was just thinking out loud, a query for the aether, that he asked. “What was it that Raville gave to you back there, anyway? You never showed me.”

Amara paused, and he assumed she was just looking for a suitable hand hold. The climb was turning out to be more difficult than it had looked on the way down. Every mountain looked like a molehill from the top, even fake ones.

But she said in a tired voice, “It was a zap destination address.”

“Really?” He wasn’t certain if he was more amazed by the information or her offering of it.

“No, John. I’m making it up.”

“What terminus?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t one I recognized. Maybe it’s the new one, the depot that was just established in Phi Sophia.”

Dorian squinted thoughtfully, trying to pull the name of the place out of his memory. “Kedesma,” he said. “No, the moon was Giari Tau. That one, you mean?”

“I assume so, yes.”

“Hmph. That doesn’t seem very helpful on the surface of it. Frying pan into the fire and all that.”

She sighed. “John, darling, I love you. I want you to understand that. But you are not the person I want to talk to about behavior that may or may not seem very helpful to the cause right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Can we talk about this later? Like when we’re both at the top?”

“No. This is the most you’ve spoken to me since we geeked to that godforsaken temple. I want to know what you mean by that.”

He could almost make out the individual curses she leveled at him. “Fine. I’ll come down.”

“Nevermind. I’m on my way up. Just wait there.”

Dorian closed his eyes and imagined himself beside her. There was no sensation of movement, no physical transition; he simply opened his eyes and he was there on a ledge wide enough for him to sit comfortably with is feet dangling over the twenty meter drop to the scrub and mounds of broken rock below. If he had not thought to extend the ledge to contain Amara as well, she might have tumbled off the face of the mountain.

“How did you do that?”

Dorian put his back against a stone outcropping conveniently shaped to fit his back and shrugged innocently. “I can do a number of things here that I couldn’t do before. You taught me how back there,” He gestured vaguely toward the area where Sonali and the Archive lay, “when you told me to make myself. I learned some important features about the architecture with the information I” consumed “accessed and added to my foam. It allowed me to force a connection between my architecture and this one, using its own protocols the same way the orb appended itself to my foam in the first place. All I have to do is imagine it and the environment handles the rest. The coding is transparent and instantaneous. I think this was what Raville wanted all along.”

Amara released her grip on the rock and edged over to him. She seated herself beside him and placed her hands in her lap. For a time, they just sat, watching the horizon and mulling over things they might have to say to one another, but didn’t.

She glanced at him pensively. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“You weren’t talking to me.”

“Well, that’s certainly an adult perspective on matters.”

Dorian grimaced. “It wasn’t just that. I’ve been playing with it to the extent that I understand it. Seeing how it works. It’s really rather clever, the way the orb manages to replicate synchronous variable memes across independent foam sessions. No, clever is too light a word. It’s groundbreaking. On installation, it copies some of the fundamental foam structures that we manipulate as reg files and boots them off into a shared sub-kitrionic reservoir of potential waveforms that feed the environmental compilers. The reservoir is hardcoded, which means that we and anyone else who accessed it via the generation of the orb we were given can share the same experiences in a sort of cosmic p2p connection, at least to the extent that our foam didn’t lock down the architectural regs. It’s like jacking the space-time continuum–the structural dataverse itself and doing whatever you want with it. But the bottom line is that while we’re inside it, in the liminal space between our own foam and the sub-kitrionic reservoir, I’m able to use the native capabilities of my foam to re-order the functioning of the orb. I’ve taken back my own territory from whatever logic was driving it and can propagate those changes across the network the orb created.”

He was getting carried away, he realized, and not answering the question she had asked in the first place. “That possibility–that I could jack the reservoir and free us from the orb’s absolute influence–was why I did what I did in the temple. I’m sorry I didn’t give you more warning. I should have said something to prepare you for what I was about to do. It’s just that…well, the knowledge came to me. What I was supposed to do, I mean. It all came together and I had to act on it. For some reason it seemed important that I got my hands on the data before it could slither back into the well. I really didn’t have a choice about what form that access took. Maybe I could have done something else. I probably should have, but–”

Amara reached out and took his hand between her own. She held it in her lap, stroking it softly. “Hush. It’s okay, John.”

“I don’t want you to be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry with you. Not anymore at least. I just didn’t understand.”

“What did you think I was doing?”

“I thought that you were sabotaging us. I thought that you were trying to keep Raville from telling me what the next step was, so that we wouldn’t have to go. So that we could do what you want to do…run off and hide from it all.” She bit her lower lip. “It was stupid of me. I should have trusted you.”

“But I don’t believe,” he said.

“You don’t believe. But you would do anything to keep me from being harmed. I see that, too. You’d let the whole universe burn if it was a choice between that and saving me. Because of Lily.”

Lily. The mention of her name was like a knife jabbed up under his ribs, aimed at his heart. “Lily is dying. Danek told me this morning before we left. I’m not supposed to say anything to her about it. I’m not supposed to even know. She doesn’t want my pity.”

“She doesn’t want you to feel guilty for something that isn’t your fault.”

Dorian lay his head back against stone and waved his hand. Floating on the air before them, a woman appeared. Lovely and dark, strong and smiling, a beautiful child in the first bloom of youth. Exactly as she had once been, all those years ago, and the way he still imagined her in his mind’s eye.

“Why can’t it be that easy out there?” he said. “I wave my magic wand and all the pain, all the mistakes just go away. No one dies; no one suffers because of failure. Just pure bliss.”

He dropped his hand and the image vanished in a puff of cloud.

“It can be that way, John. One day, when we’ve put off this existence and learned what the Exousiai have to teach us. That’s what we’re fighting for: the end of the suffering we’ve created for ourselves. The end of human experience and the beginning of something glorious that we can’t even imagine yet.”

“Heaven,” he said. “She already believes in that. Maybe that’s what she thinks she’s doing–beating us to it. That would be just like Lily, going off to prepare a place for the rest of us rowdy kids.”

Despite himself, he found that he liked that idea. It was better than the alternative, better than believing that she would be gone, just more data to be recycled from the universal waste bin.

“If you think that Raville sent us here only to give you the means to control the orb, what are we supposed to take from the scene that was played out for us in the temple? He said it would explain everything.”

Dorian shrugged. “Let’s ask him.”

“I don’t think the Archive is safe for us.”

“Feh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But he was already in action, reaching across the ever-thinning barrier between his foam and the orb, activating selected files he had placed in his original datascape, then backed up to the new one before his old foam had been destroyed. The landscape around them shuddered like a triDvid file caught in a loop. The sky wavered and the trees far below them rocked from side to side. The world skipped, blurred, and reformed itself in a sharp transition that took his breath away.

Dorian exhaled and shook his head to clear the last wisps of signal replacement out of his array’s moderator. Gone were the mountains and raging blue sky, the cool touch of stone against his back and thighs. In their place was stone and leather, the great windows and perpetual afternoon sunlight of Raville’s memory palace. They found themselves once more on the creaking sofa before the fireplace in the richly textured lounge.

Raville lifted his eyebrows in amazement. “Impressively managed, Mr. Dorian. You may just get the hang of this yet.”

Dorian winked at Amara. “I told you I hadn’t hurt him.”

Amara gazed about her with a shocked uncertainty. “Where are we?” she asked in mild alarm.

“Our friend intimated that he might have more information to pass along if we got this far, so I copied the latest iteration of his core files into my foam and gave him a reporting stream to keep tabs on our progress.”

“And hardly more than that,” Raville interjected. “Here I sit, a copy of a copy. Quite literally a shadow of my former self. It is mightily humbling.”

“You deserve a little humbling,” Dorian groused at him. Whatever else might have changed, his estimation of Raville’s motives had not. “The only reason you got as much as you did was simply because I didn’t feel like ramping up the iteration I already had in my foam and subjecting myself to your introductory spiel all over again. You’ve been more trouble than you were worth from the start, but now you’re going to repay my kindness and toleration in full. We have a couple of things that require explanation from you.”

Raville ignored him for the moment. He climbed to his feet and scented the air, turning his head from side to side. “What is this place? This isn’t your foam.”

“You should recognize it. It’s your code, after all.”

“The quae-ha-distra?” He seemed legitimately impressed. “You’ve grown more adept than I had even imagined.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. A slow smile played across his lips. “Yes. I remember now. Then you’ve assimilated the datacore, just as I’d hoped. Splendid!”

“Not as splendid as you’d probably like, I’m sure. I’ve disabled your access to inter-architectural input for the time being. You’re just a spectator here.”

Raville grinned broadly and resumed his seat. “There’s that paranoid streak again.”

“I think John has proven that he knows exactly what he’s doing,” Amara snapped.

Her inexplicably cool attitude seemed to stun Raville. “How quickly our faith turns to skepticism in trying times. I thought for sure that you were my one true ally in this business.”

“Allies communicate truthfully with one another. They don’t manipulate friends for their own selfish ends.”

Dorian interrupted them before the argument could get properly underway. “A conversation for another time. Right now we need some answers. Let’s start with something simple like what you intended us to take away from that scene at the temple.”

Raville arched an eyebrow. “You would call it simple. You are a master of understatement, Mr. Dorian. That scene, as you put it, is the key to everything. It was the turning point in human history as you know it. Simple, indeed!”

“Which is why I want you to parse the narrative for us,” Dorian said patiently. “It may have been readily understandable to you, I had other things on my mind at the time–like figuring out how to assimilate the rogue datacore, per your designs.”

The notion that anything short of imminent and violent death would have been more pressing seemed to offend Raville. “What you witnessed was a faithful recreation of the first words spoken to me from the mouth of the Exousiai. It was the revelation of their map for the human destiny. All of their intentions, all of the blessings they sought to bestow were unveiled to me. As Eliahu spoke, I was transported into a magical space of pure memory. Not my own memory, but a universal memory written on the very fabric of being. No less than the mythic retelling of the intended evolution of our whole species.”

He read their blank expressions with obvious dissatisfaction. “Don’t you see? The Exousiai have come into our savage lands and made themselves known to us over time, the sleeping denizens of this darkling material plane, in order to awaken us. I was awakened as part of that first wave of explorers to blaze a trail with zap through the wilderness of embodiment and place us back on the road to the end that should have always been ours: ascent to the perfect mind of cosmic knowledge. It is our doom to wrest the pearl, the hidden pearl of knowledge, from the dragon of the flesh so that we might be liberated–so that we might all put on the cloaks of our true being and see ourselves as we truly are and should be–as we will be when all our individual sparks are gathered up into the grand cosmic organism. What you were meant to experience during the transition into the temple sequence was just a taste of that Being, raw and unrefined, but as much as our underdeveloped human consciousness can tolerate of the ineffable. I wanted you to touch it, however imperfectly, so that you would understand what is at stake here and what we stand to lose if my other self is allowed to perpetrate his madness.” Raville spared a look of disappointment for Dorian. “After having drunk from the well of knowledge, you at least I would have expected to understand these things.”

“I brought you along to explain it to me,” Dorian responded. “Don’t give me any more reasons to remember that you serve no purpose otherwise.”

The fact of the matter was that he needed any insights Raville had to offer. He needed information in order to understand how to combat the forces arrayed against them. The hijacked datacore was full of promises, but it was still largely a mystery to him. He had only dipped shallowly into the pool of data he had assimilated, taking only what he had needed to counteract the orb’s control. The rest was an intricate, incestuous nest of sub-routines that were dazzling to the eye and wrenching to the mind. It would take days of steady analysis to make much sense out of it. If he was lucky, he could seed most of it into his mem extensors, but what he had seen already wasn’t in a form that could be easily rendered for seeding. It would be another task for his copious spare time.

Raville fell into a pout and stared unhappily out the windows. “I’ve thrown open the windows of the universe for you,” he muttered, “and all you choose to see is the draperies.”

“So John was right,” Amara said, her words tinged with sadness that made her sound momentarily lost, a child crying out in the wilderness. “From the beginning, he was right. You wrote the code. You created the environment and the–the objects within it. It wasn’t the Exousiai that touched me at all.”

Raville wavered uneasily. “Technically, yes. The load from the origin foam to appended orbital space involves some…ah, manipulation.”

“Then it was all just an illusion.”

“An inspired illusion,” Raville stressed. “A foretaste of the divine.”

“And yet still a fiction.”

“But a fiction grounded in truth. That is the difference. You can’t catch God in a bottle, my dear. There aren’t bottles made that are big enough for the task. But with this space, I’ve tried. I’ve translated mundane human physics into the pure mathematics of a divine race. Yes, some moderation occurs. The lines are blurred, the absolute potentiality is truncated. Yet I was as faithful to the Truth as my skills permitted. That’s always been the work of theology, hasn’t it? The Truth is beyond us. Instead we create our pleasant fictions, weave our catechistic tales, clothe our truths in garments we can readily understand. It’s the nature of the ineffable to be ineffable, you understand? Every telling is an embroidery upon that central experience. Every relation of the tale is a metaphor for that which words cannot describe. The metaphor is–must be–fiction to one degree or another, because we cannot comprehend or express naked Truth in our present form. But recognizing the fiction that overlays it as such does not make the Truth any less true, just more occult.” Raville furrowed his brow darkly. “Prophets and mystics have declared their mysteries, their patient infiltrations of the House of God, from the desert wastes just as I have for time immemorial, and we call them holy! Stop looking at me as though I was a charlatan.”

But Amara stubbornly insisted on her point. “You said it was a portal into the world of the Exousiai.”

“And it is! When you come here, you make yourself ready to receive the incarnation that is coming.”

“It isn’t the same,” Amara said in a quiet voice. “They’re not here. This is just a game.”

“You call it a game. I call it a sanctuary where we can learn to understand the things we cannot otherwise know, where we can breathe the sweet incense of their exhalations and interact with them through the thinnest of veils. This is a training ground for our future mode of being. I’m sorry if that wasn’t immediately clear to you, but it is not mere illusion.” Raville reached out and plucked at the skin of Dorian’s hand. “I call flesh illusion, a test to see if we’re worthy to take the next step. How can you argue with that? Just look at me! I have no flesh, and yet I live, I grow, I see with clarity that those of you still roiling about in your bags of meat can’t, even when the truth is laid out before you. That has always been the Word of the Exousiai. We’ve reached the limits of flesh’s capabilities. We don’t progress so much as we just devise new and clever variations on the ancient themes that have always plagued us: what do we eat, how do we acquire goods, how do we make ourselves live longer and increase our quality of life. Now we have better tools designed to provide those answers with less effort and little risk. But our technology isn’t gnosis, it’s just modern solutions to the old problems. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of fighting the same battles our species had waged since we crawled up out of the slime or shared a bit of apple or whatever myth you prefer. I’m ready to wrest the pearl from the dragon and get along to the home that should have always been ours in the first place.”

Dorian applauded in polite mockery. “Wonderful. When we get around to building the First Church of Michael Raville, we’ll have those words inscribed above the front doors for the edification of the faithful.” He fixed Raville with a hard gaze to make it clear that any response would be unwelcome. “The problem is that I’m a happy heathen. I like believing in the Old Gods, and I’m not nearly as convinced that they’re dead and in their graves as you are. But a wise lady recently pointed out to me that I don’t have to believe in your gods to see that they’ve begun to attract disciples, even to tickle the ear of an emperor who may or may not be happy to knock down our high places to erect shrines of his own. Someone out there believes enough to have dispatched a few thousand Marines to the utter limit of human exploration, and eventually that viral meme will begin to propagate across human space. Something is happening out there. A strange wind has begun to blow, and it doesn’t take a meteorologist to see that it’s eventually going to blow over my house. In fact, it’s already blown over my house, and I’m a little pissed off about it, frankly.

“So, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to stop engaging in these merry little worldview clashes and agree that something is going on. We’re going to agree also that people who sit in big chairs–and are used to ordering around people who don’t–are making decisions that could potentially affect us all, so it’s in our best interest to at least find out what they’re arguing about behind closed doors. To that extent, we’re all reading off the same agenda. Where it goes beyond that is a topic for future discussion, but for us to continue to stay on the same page henceforth, we need to exchange useful and accurate data. Is that clear enough?”

There were no objections, so Dorian nodded briskly and got on with it. “First item, then. In the temple, prior to my assimilation of the datacore, it passed a zap terminus address to Amara. Where is that depot?”

“With any luck, it is the new EOSO depot established on Giari Tau.”

Amara blinked at him, nonplussed. “With any luck?”

“It isn’t as if that’s a published terminus. That’s highly restricted government information. But the fact that it was given to you makes me reasonably confident that it is correct.” Amara looked as if she was about to erupt, and Raville went on quickly in placatory tones. “It isn’t really so bad as it sounds. The code engine that drives the temple environment is an open ended dynamic query builder–”

“We figured that out,” Dorian informed him.

“Yes, but you undoubtedly relied on standard facilitated input protocols…you directed your queries to Moira as a gatekeeper. But it isn’t only Moira that’s linked into the query engine. The iteration of the orb that I embedded in your foam–” he flicked his finger back and forth between them to indicate that he meant both of them, “–contained its own formula query generator that was launched when the datacore was accessed the first time. The pre-scripted query kicked out a parameter file tagged to your orb id profile, Amara, and would have done the same with Dorian’s if his security measures hadn’t blocked it, that searched the datacore for any terminus string address format that didn’t match the most recently updated list of addresses I had hardcoded into the script. The address it gave you was merely the answer to a question you weren’t aware you had asked.”

Dorian nodded in understanding. “You wrote it on the assumption that you would continue to store any new data related to the Exousiai in that foam.”

“Exactly. And if I was mistaken, or my enfleshed half had changed his pattern of behavior in the intervening years, the query would have returned no data. The fact that it did respond means that this is a new address not listed in the depot destination directory published last month. That makes me, as I say, reasonably confident. Reasonably only because contrary to public opinion, there are scores and scores of proprietary military depots all over settled space which are also not listed in the directories. But it’s another fair assumption, I think, that even if my other self was aware of these addresses, he wouldn’t have stored them inside this particular subset of foam.”

Amara looked queasy as he reeled off his string of assumptions. Dorian knew what she was thinking. There were ways, it was said, for humans to zap themselves to unknown or undelineated terminus points. Cultish groups of ecstatic zaptronauts claimed to have done it for decades, riding the aetherial waves throughout the cosmos, bouncing from point to point and all points in between in an eternal zap. They claimed to hear the voice of the cosmos speaking to them upon return, some of them going so far as to publish phantasmic memoirs of their encounters with undiscovered races of alien beings. But the clumsy physiological truth was that zap relied on depots both as receptor nodes and as signal coherence stations that captured in transito schemes and refreshed them against the everpresent tug of entropy. One didn’t just zap from Point A to Point B, but traveled complex routes from terminus to terminus to insure proper signal packet retention, because the alternative, the gradual erosion via entropy, was as certain and immedicable as death.

As revolutionary as zap technology was, it still had its limits, and most people–sane people–respected them and didn’t go leaping into zap launches that had no guaranteed destination.

Dorian didn’t like Raville’s reasonable assurances any more than Amara did, but he had more pressing questions on his mind.

“Okay, so we assume that this is the proper terminus. What do you intend us to do with it? It’s not like we can zap ourselves to Giari Tau and expect to receive a warm welcome from the man who has already tried once to kill us.”

Raville grimaced in consternation. “I expect you to be clever, Mr. Dorian, and to use either the brain God gave you or the education the Marines inculcated, preferably both in tandem. I can’t tell you everything that must be done step for step. But it’s reasonable to assume that EOSO has set up its depot facilities much like every other depot, meaning that the acquisition and production of zapped scheme objects is an automated process. There may be a technician or two present on-site to coordinate the storage of reproduced materials, but I’m certain you’ll find a way to deal with them appropriately. That should buy you a little time, at least.”

“Time for what, exactly?”

“Whatever you deem necessary, of course.”

Raville gave them both a significant look, and let his words hang ominously in the air.

“Right,” Dorian remarked. “Because as a card-carrying Border Marine, blowing stuff up comes naturally to me.”

“That was one of the qualifications that recommended you, yes.”

He stabbed at Raville with a significant look of his own. “You know, your admirable willingness to have your actual self murdered for the greater good notwithstanding, before I start wreaking havoc on your behalf, I’d really like you to explain to me why you decided to help your alter-ego try to kill us in the first place.”

Raville put on a shocked expression. His eyebrows climbed halfway up his forehead. “Pardon me?”

Amara gave a little yelp like she’d been stung. “What?”

“I’ve been giving recent events some serious thought, and there’s one tiny detail that keeps sticking in my mind. There wasn’t enough time for Raville to break my encryptions, dispatch a strike team and wire my coffin with key-sensitive explosives between the time you gave the orb to Amara and the time my coffin exploded. That is, not unless there was someone on the inside feeding him information–like who we were for instance, like the sort of data that could be extracted from our personnel files.” Raville paled. His mouth fell open as though he intended to protest, but no sound came forth. Dorian forged ahead. “But that was impossible, right? I mean, you had no access to the world outside the Archive’s network. There was no way you could send him that information because you didn’t have access to the Strand.”

Raville squirmed and gripped the arms of his chair, and Dorian smiled craftily. “But you didn’t need the Strand once the orb had been activated, did you? It creates its own network, and not just between Amara and I, but also to the reservoir where the environmental variables reside, which can be instantly accessed from Raville’s foam. When you booted Amara from your node on the Archive’s network, it wasn’t so she could assimilate the orb; it was so that you could use her to transmit data back to Raville through the conduit the orb created. You made her into a messenger, and once Raville received your ping, he had access to whatever he wanted in her foam, including any information you had loaded about the two of us into the orb script. Everything that happened after that was your way of slowing me down so he would have time to react.” He paused to give both of them time to consider his accusations, then continued in deadly earnest. “What I don’t understand is why. Why ask for our help and then turn around and try to kill us?”

Raville studied him for a long time without speaking. Whatever he was considering twisted his lips into sour and unhappy shapes.

“You don’t understand,” he said at last. “You so clearly don’t understand, it’s ludicrous.”

“You’d better make me understand, then, because until I do, you can carry out your crusade to save humanity on your own.”

Raville’s eyes darted from Dorian to Amara. “I must do what I was created to do. You understand that, surely. There are certain constraints–”

“What I understand,” Dorian snapped, “is that you’ve been entirely too willing to pass off half-truths and outright lies in order to manipulate us into carrying out your private agenda. That’s going to stop.”

“He wasn’t trying to kill both of you,” Raville rolled his eyes in exasperation, then fixed them on Dorian. “Just you.”

“That’s comforting.”

But Amara stiffened with alarm and clutched at Dorian’s hand. “But why? Why would he only go after John? I was the one who took the orb, not him. He should be after me!”

“Mr. Dorian was kind enough to perform a service for me after you had accepted the orb. A technical service of sorts that was designed to protect your anonymity from unwanted attention. In hiding your infiltration, he necessarily exposed himself.”

“Then it’s my fault. Oh, John, your beautiful coffin–”

“No, my dear,” Raville said softly. “Your activity with the orb is not the sole reason, at any rate. He was a target because he doesn’t fit into the grand design Raville has envisioned. That’s all. He was a wild card, a potential threat, and ultimately expendable. What happened at Quiksand is best thought of as an error. . .a misjudgment on my shadow self’s part. Not so much a misunderstanding as a necessary misdirection that entailed some unavoidable risks.”

Dorian pondered that one word with rising displeasure. Misdirecting who, exactly? “Why do I not like the sound of that?”

“Everything that has happened occurred because it must. The stakes are much higher than one apartment, one man, though I regret the inconvenience, of course. But you knew that Amara had to be protected from Raville, and you willingly accepted that burden. He couldn’t be allowed to have knowledge of her possession of the orb.”

There was a troubling nuance in Raville’s tone. Something he was saying without speaking it. “You didn’t send me after her just because she was more vulnerable than I would be,” Dorian said, halting, working it out as he spoke. “I would have had a better chance of masking myself, but that’s not it, is it? It had nothing to do with masking me, because you turned around and gave me up. You didn’t just want to trick him with an anonymous intrusion. . .you were trying to protect Amara specifically.”

Raville grew thoughtful and the lines of his face hardened. “You have no idea how perilous the explanation you seek is, how precarious is the balance of history. With one misspoken word, I could destroy everything I have worked for.”

“It’s Amara. Something about her that you thought you needed to hide at all costs.”

“Yes.”

Amara’s attention wavered between them. “What about me? I don’t understand.”

Raville seemed to make a sudden, difficult decision, but there was no relief in it, only a terrible sense of dread. “It’s only because you choose not to understand. You’ve been eating the food of the darkling lands for so long, you may have forgotten that you even want to. But you will remember with time. The quae-ha-distra has already begun to awaken you.”

“Awaken her to what?”

“To her true nature, of course. It’s the reason she came to me in the first place.”

He was talking about the memory palace, Dorian assumed. “She came to you by accident. She was following me, remember?”

“Don’t blind yourself with linear causes and effects. What is and what seems to be do not always align where the Exousiai are involved. She did what the immanent emergence of the quae-ha-distra demanded.”

“That makes no sense,” Dorian argued. “You gave her the orb only after we had shown up on your doorstep. That’s some wicked non-linear causation.”

Raville lanced a sour glare at Dorian. “Your mistake is in presuming that the orb and quae-ha-distra are the same.” He opened his hands to indicate their current environment. “This is not the true quae-ha-distra. It is little more than a clumsy machination, a shadow of an ideal, constructed so that one might partake of the divine world to the extent that we mere humans are able. What I gave to Amara was only the catalyst to inspire her to reclaim what was already her own. Your involvement in this whole affair, Mr. Dorian, was merely to facilitate that transmission and then to keep the orb in secure foam where it could be manipulated without exposing us all to our enemy’s scrutiny.

“The orb itself was designed to serve as a bridge between the unknowable and the mundane, the Exousiai and the merely human. It is a simulacrum of the true quae-ha-distra possessed and mastered by the Exousiai themselves, and to a certain extent, as I have said, capable of translating the experience of the Exousiai into human understanding through the manner in which it interprets and interfaces with the foam environment the quae-ha-distra itself controls. But the universe of the Exousiai is a pure state of knowing. No one can hide from what is known, and for that reason, the limitations of the orb are also its strength. Because it operates in human reality, driven by code and subject to the limitations of our technology, the state of pure knowing can be obfuscated. Given the right tools, one can touch the orb without being touched by it. It can be manipulated in a way that provides access to the sacred foam without fully becoming immersed within it.”

Amara appeared nonplussed and shifted warily in her seat. “You said you were only returning to me what was mine. I don’t know what that means. Why was it necessary that I have it?”

“Because the time is short. Raville is moving and you must be–”

“Awakened. We know,” Dorian muttered.

“Yes, but what are you trying to awaken me to, exactly?” Amara asked.

“To the mastery of the true quae-ha-distra that has been latent within you all along, of course.”

A grim weight settled in Dorian’s stomach. “The pearl.”

“No. Even the true quae-ha-distra is not the pearl. Amara is the pearl. All that she is, all that she encompasses, all that she desires to be, seems to be and is becoming–that is the pearl.”

Amara blinked at him, uncomprehending. Dorian thought he might vomit.

“You are one of them, my dear,” Raville cooed, smiling. “You are Exousiai.”

Dorian could only laugh.

“Why is it so hard to believe? Think for just a moment about the things you have seen. Why does Amara feel and see and experience the Exousiai in this place, but you don’t? Because of your superbly advanced security structures?” Raville barked a harsh, sarcastic laugh. “Please. They are gods to creatures such as us. You do not sense them because for us, for mere mortals, they do not exist on this plane. They’re not here. I would never have dared to code them. It would have been blasphemous. But Amara feels them, because the orb opened her up and allowed her to reach beyond the constraints of the environment and touch the universe on the other side through her own quae-ha-distra. She reaches out to them, because she is one of them, and they reach back, and if she would but open her eyes a little more, she would see that she doesn’t need the false orb at all. All that she requires is already contained within her.

“But you ask yourself, what is this awakening, then? Why would one of the Exousiai need a flawed mechanism to remember themselves? Because she is wholly human and wholly god. Those two realities war within her, and she loves them both–that which she is, and that which she has chosen to be. Have you even asked yourself why the orb environment rendered as it did? Surely you weren’t expecting your own beloved Sonali of all the possible renders in the human imagination. For what inconceivable reason would it take such a form? There is only one answer: Amara. Amara the woman and Amara the pearl of the Exousiai both struggling for control. She chose what pleased her most, and as a result what had been became something completely new.”

Dorian tried to scoff. He wanted to turn to Amara, to look into her eyes while she denied it, and laugh Raville into oblivion. It was stupid. Senseless. Insane. But he could do none of those things. He was suddenly afraid. Afraid that she wouldn’t, or couldn’t deny it. Because she believed. She had always believed.

It was Amara who broke the silence that fell among them. “Maybe that explains the orb, John, when we were with Lily and Danek. . .out there. Even though it was impossible, I was able to make it real, remember? Maybe that’s why, because it’s a part of me.”

“No.” He wasn’t even going to entertain the idea.

Raville, however, lifted his head and offered a comforting smile. “It isn’t a part of you, Amara. It is a manifestation of the fundament of you. You’re coming into your own, and part of that becoming is being able to warp the fabric of simple matter to your will. To choose it and make it so.

“This still doesn’t explain to me why you’ve been working in consort with your other self against us,” Dorian spat.

“Actually, it explains everything to one who has the proper context for understanding all that I’ve tried to tell you. I’ve been honest to the extent that I was able up to this point. The things that I’ve told you about the war, about what my actual self has determined to do, that’s all true, every word of it. But I have kept things from you. If I had told you the truth from the beginning, you wouldn’t have believed me. Some things you had to see and experience for yourselves. Awakening is a delicate task. Too much signal and the communication fails. Too much noise yields the same result. Communication is a ratio between truth and lies.”

“And what is the truth, Michael?” Amara said, almost whispering.

“The truth, dear Amara, is that I can’t afford to lose you again. Failing now would doom us all.”

“Again?”

To Dorian, Raville suddenly looked as frightened as Amara. “It’s hard to even know where to begin. I have sought you for so many years. Longer than you could possibly know. My entire life has been devoted to the task of finding you. From the instant Eliahu passed the quae-ha-distra to us–our birthright, Raville’s and mine–it was you who called out to us. Everywhere in the universe we touched, your warmth already was, vanished yet lingering. You filled the firmament with your wonder; you imbued the darkness with light. Your voice was the thunder rolling down from the mountains, and the memory of you a mystery. You are the pearl, and we were commissioned by the gods who made you to help bring you home.

“I was created to serve that single purpose: to keep my actual self informed of developments that he could not readily track in the virtual or secured dataverse. I know this. At base, I am just a spider, a script, and even though I live, I ruminate, I grow and learn, that fact is inescapable. We wrote the orb, he and I, back when we were still one. We created it on the model of the original quae-ha-distra to provide a conduit for communication between ourselves once we had become separated, in case I should find evidence of the pearl’s existence inside the Oak Ridge foam.

“And because of this simulated orb, because of its fundamental nature, I had no choice in performing the service for which I was made, both at Oak Ridge, and afterward, at the Archive. It is part of what I am. It correlates the things that I have learned and waits for a bounce point to deliver its payload into the parent foam. So I have had to be cautious, because my thoughts are not my own. I can hoard what I learn only until it is taken from me, and then it becomes his as well. Because of this, I’ve had to be crafty, do you understand?”

She nodded, but did not speak.

“When our paths diverged, his and mine, and I could no longer see into his mind, I continued to do what I could to accomplish the mission for which I had been made. I sought the pearl, and he has allowed me to work independently either because he does not believe that I will guess his plans or he simply is not aware that I have continued in this infernal existence. But it’s clear to me that whatever transformations he has undergone, one thing remains the same: Raville still craves the pearl. But he is wary of moving prematurely to take it on his own. He has learned over the years to be cautious, to beware the dangers of acting rashly, so he has been content to trust my observations and wait for my signal, even as he conducts his own private research. And that is where I have been able to deceive him. You see, while Raville is aware that the pearl is here on Trithemius Orbis, he knows nothing beyond that. He does not know you, Amara. That is a secret I have guarded most jealously.

“And now you see why I sought John’s assistance. With his help, I could both give you the orb and protect you from the consequences. Dorian could quarantine it. He could help you to explore it in depth and yet safely. He might even find a way to render it harmless for your use, so that you could be awakened without Raville being alerted.”

Raville grimaced as if the decision still pained him. “It was admittedly not the best plan, giving you the orb so unprepared, Amara, but it was a better hope than we had otherwise. The danger, of course, was that once it had quickened within you, it would access the Sting as its encoding requires and transmit your identity to the parent foam. I would not be able to hide the pearl from Raville any longer. He would know the truth at last and move to take you for his own. That was where John’s assistance was essential, though I fear I had to bait my line with one or two false pretenses on your behalf. Fortunately, he did not fail.”

Hook. Line. Sinker.

Dorian barely kept himself from groaning aloud.

“He hid me from Raville,” Amara said.

“Indeed. He both hid you at the critical moment before you could be revealed to our enemies, and he pulled you back from the precipice of disaster when you balked at recognizing your true self and your own people.”

“And that’s why Raville wants to kill him. Because he covered my intrusion with his own.”

Raville hesitated, chewing his lower lip. “As I said before, only in part.”

Dorian suspected that it was the other part that was going to piss him off. “Get on with it.”

“There were a couple of complications to this plan as I had formulated it. One problem, as I said, with delivering the orb to you was that for the orb to quicken within you, it had to access the foam domain of the quae-ha-distra. This fact cannot be hidden as easily as the identity of the person who may have assimilated the orb itself. Raville might not immediately know who it was, but allowing him to know that it had happened at all was problematic in itself. After the code we had written had been dormant for so many years, he would assume from any activity via that source that the pearl had been found, and he would subsequently bend all of his resources to locating that individual. It would only be a matter of time before he found you.”

“Unless you gave him a fatted calf,” Dorian said. It was the logical conclusion. It was also sort of clever. The sort of thing he might do. . .sacrifice one Strand identity infiltrating some dense ice to hide the incursion of another. “Moo.”

Raville chuckled, but uneasily. “It wasn’t a decision I made lightly.”

“Blah, blah, blah. It was a calculated risk. Blah, blah, blah. We get it. Getting it doesn’t mean we’re going to think more highly of you, it just means that we get it, okay?” Pfft. “So Amara hit the Strand, jacked Raville’s foam and allowed a comm. Channel between the two of you to be opened. What did you tell him?”

“I told him that you were a singularly troublesome and pig-headed cretin who had jacked my hidden port and that it wouldn’t be long before you uncovered all of our dealings with the Exousiai and splashed that data from one end of the Strand to the other.”

“Makes perfect sense to me. Much more useful than telling him, for example that I was a mostly harmless bungler, the intrusion was an accident and he could just as safely leave me alone as waste perfectly good explosives on my account.”

Raville stared at him. “I can’t say that line of argument ever crossed my mind.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

Raville dismissed his sarcasm with an indignant sniff. “Tell me, Dorian, if none of that had happened, if this experience hadn’t physically cost you anything precious, what would you have done with the things I revealed to you? I’ll tell you: you would have done exactly nothing. You would have gone home to your cozy coffin, changed into your pajamas and tucked yourself into bed. In the morning, you would have gotten up and gone to work and pretended that nothing had happened. You would have turned your back on everything and convinced yourself that what you had been told was only ranting of a soured upload package that desperately needed purging. And you would go right on believing that until the moment the world ended in a bitter conflagration of Exousian fire.”

Dorian grunted. “Yeah, and if I’d been in your shoes and had determined to dump the orb on Amara like you did, I would have at least admitted that I was about to rat me out to a bunch of intergalactic professional killers so that I could, you know, be ready for it or something.”

“And what would that have availed you? You would still have been hunted. And forewarned, you would have found the deepest, darkest hole in the galaxy and crawled into it until the storm had passed, and what is worse, you would have taken Amara with you against her better judgment and simultaneously condemned the rest of us to extinction. That was not an acceptable option.”

“Unacceptable to you, maybe. It’s always easier to be reasonable when it’s isn’t your life that gets blown to bits, isn’t it? The fact remains that you almost killed me. You almost killed both of us! Tell me that wouldn’t have put a damper on your plan to save the universe.”

“You’re overreacting. If you’ll recall, we happen to share the same foam address at the moment,” Raville said, tapping the side of his head with his finger. “And while both of us are readily recyclable, getting us killed would indeed have put a crimp in my timeline. I had just as much at stake as you did, so I was both ready and able to ping your system with a warning if you had ignored your instincts and proceeded toward your apartment last night. But I had to make sure that you left an audit trail both arriving at Quiksand and accessing your local network router so that Raville would believe that you had been successfully terminated. If anything, I saved your life through the choices I made. And I bought us some valuable time. If Raville had guessed the truth even for an instant, he would have been much more careful about making certain you were dead.”

No matter how Raville explained it to him, as far as Dorian was concerned, the plan still sucked, even if it wasn’t actually as monumentally bad as it had seemed on the surface. Maybe all plans sucked from the perspective of the bleating calf. He glowered at Raville for awhile, and when that didn’t make him feel better either, he eventually set about to making himself understand why. If the actual Raville had truly believed him to be dead, he wouldn’t have chased him so vigorously from one corner of the Strand to the next. He wouldn’t even have thought to look. But he obviously had thought it, and had spent the down time digging into every link to Dorian’s public and private accounts that he could find–apparently with great success, judging by how fast they had burned through his ip masks.

He and Amara had squandered any freedom they might have had by logging back onto the Strand. His foam, his coffin, his whole life: it was a high price to pay for a few hours of reprieve.

All because Raville had told them that they had to go back into the orb.

All because he was so determined to awaken her.

Nope. Even looking at it beneath the surface, the plan still sucked.

“The only thing it did was buy us some time,” he said.

“Yes. But he doesn’t know where you are.”

“And Amara?”

Raville shrugged. “He’ll know about her eventually, if he doesn’t already. That has always been inescapable. My hope is that he’ll believe she is just your partner in crime for a while yet.”

“And when he believes otherwise?”

Raville became intensely sober. “He’ll hunt you down and kill you. He’ll petition the Archive to have me purged.”

“And me?” Amara asked quietly. “What will he do with me?”

“You, he will possess. He will take you, and if he can, he will bend you to whatever purpose he intends. What he can’t do is hurt you, Amara. You are the pearl, a creature of another order entirely, the product of a defiant and supreme physics. You can’t be destroyed by any tool known to man.”

“I hear you say that, and you seem to sincerely believe it, but that’s the part that has me worried. You keep saying that I’m indestructible, that I can’t be harmed, but I’m not. I’ve already been dead. Twice. How can I be an Ex–one of them, if that’s true?”

Raville shrugged as if she was only making excuses. “Even a human should know better than think so literally. Flesh is transient; it is nothing. The only true death is data corruption and signal entropy. To those things, you are immune, because you are formed from the raw material of the universe itself. That is what I’m saying. You cannot die. As long as the universe endures, you are beyond mortality.”

“If I’m not human, if I am Exousiai, what am I doing here?”

Raville tried to smile, gently curling his lips, but he was troubled. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

“I don’t know what to believe. There’s so much that doesn’t make sense. You said that you’ve been watching me for years. But how can that be? How can you know anything for certain when I’ve only been here in Sonali for five years?”

Dorian heard the question she did not ask: Or is it just that you’re not certain?

“My dear, you must stop thinking in human terms,” Raville answered, without apology. “We’ve been pursuing you for decades. More than decades, in fact. Over a century, certainly, in one form or another, long before I arranged to have myself bequeathed to the Archive.”

“Michael, I can’t be more than twenty-seven or eight, even by the Trithemian calendar.”

Raville chuckled. “You haven’t been that young even in this body in quite some time, Amara, despite what you have convinced yourself to believe. Raville and I first came upon the scent of your incarnation in confidential dox transcriptions from the post-operational interviews with Malcolm and Bernhardt all the way back at Oak Ridge. They spoke of having had visions during their military proto-zaps of a small mining confab on Caviel’s Paradiso, of being drawn to that place by incomprehensible forces, and meeting there a young boy there with a remarkable talent for divining lodes of calyx phosphate merely by meditating on the structure of the rock. We understood the significance, if they did not. But by the time our agents reached that distant world, the boy had vanished. Not even his own mother recalled his existence. I learned this after the fact, of course, through newswire feeds and decrypted documents my actual self loaded for me into the Oak Ridge foam.

“Thereafter it was an urban Indo-Thaikon slum where an aicheniko Untouchable, a girl, miraculously and inexplicably exhibited an eidetic recollection of the entire corpus of ancient Babylonian arcane cosmological knowledge, much of which had been lost to antiquity except for scattered bits of papyrus locked away in assorted academic collections. Her people believed she had been possessed by an unclean spirit, and approached her with fear and reverence. But she slipped from our grasp too, by a matter of minutes, sacrificed on some pagan altar to appease the local gods after a period of drought. Mere minutes! It might as well have been eons, as thoroughly as she was taken from us. And so it has gone for years, us slinking about behind you, scenting your trail and closing in. Sometimes missing you by hours, sometimes by days or even whole months. We began to suspect that you were intentionally evading us, and you see why even now, Raville has had to be careful. He’s learned that it is pointless to attempt to flush you out if it isn’t your will to be found.

“But in those former days, we were content to wait. We did the work that was in our hands to do. We perfected human zap. We developed advanced mimetic techniques for capturing and cataloguing the complete human pleroma. We pushed humanity as near to the brink of the evolutionary leap as we could by technology and social design alone, trusting that when we came near enough to perfection, as high up the mountain as we were able to claw on our own, the pearl would reveal itself to us and forgive our remaining unworthiness.

“Sixty years ago, I finally found you once again, on Sae Phen, of all places. A desert of ice and rock; the last place anyone would expect to find a living god. Do you remember?”

“I remember Sae Phen,” Amara said cautiously.

“In those days, there was nothing there. It was a hab colony of regional ice prospectors drilling for compressed Frist Amencules. One day, a young man appeared in the colony. He simply wandered in out of the wastes. No ship, no hab gear, not even a proper winter coat, as the story goes. He spoke a language none of them recognized, and seemed to be out of his head. The prospectors assumed that he’d crashed somewhere beyond their outer markers and by some stroke of fortune survived the harrowing and near-miraculous trek to safety. They took pity on him and found him a bed and blankets, warm food and rest, but there wasn’t one among them who didn’t believe that he would die. He was severely hypothermic, more frozen than frostbitten, looked as though he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. They put him to bed in the communal hut expecting him to never regain consciousness.

“For two days, he gave them no reason to believe otherwise, but on the third, he woke suddenly, with a start, it seemed. He climbed out of bed and began to wander the hab, as though seeking something he had lost, but could not remember. This would have been spectacular enough, not only that he was up and moving and in apparently good health, but he greeted the prospectors in their own tongue, and by their names, as though he had been among them his entire life. As time passed, he displayed a startling talent for the work, for mining Frist Amencules. But beyond that, he knew things. Wonderful things about Sae Phen, about its hidden life and ecosystem. Some claimed that he could hear the planet itself speaking to him, giving up its secrets. Groaning, was his word. The planet was groaning, yearning to be. He told tales of fabled Hermes the Thrice-Great. He recited whole chunks of Lurianic mysteries, Kao-Carelin wisdom and Chao particulates, all in carefree and easy syllables, as if he had known the Masters and loved them well, and he taught the children of Sae Phen to love them also. It changed the entire trajectory of the colony’s future history.”

“You’re talking about Gowan Morgan,” Amara said, confused. “The founder of Academie Waldenaise”

“I’m talking about you.”

Amara shook her head fiercely. “That can’t be right. My mother knew Gowan Morgan. I think she was qualified to tell us apart.”

Raville was unfazed by her objections. “Yes, and on the day he died–suddenly, of an apparent stroke–your mother gave birth to a healthy baby girl, though she had been barren when she left Horus Oculi to study at the Academie, as a result of a radical and elective hysterectomy. Incapable of fertilization, she conceived. From a withered vine, she bore fruit. One of her colleagues, a Dr. Jorgen Heinselm wrote a paper on the spontaneous regeneration of post-surgical reproductive systems in artificially manufactured scheme templates. It caused quite a furor in the practical mimetics field, I can assure you. I personally found his paper disappointing from a methodological standpoint.”

“You’re suggesting that I am a reincarnation of Gowan Morgan?”

“No, I’m telling you that Gowan Morgan was but one of the incarnations of you, just as Amara Cain is another. But where he was a historic curiosity protected from our scrutiny by Sae Phen’s isolation, you, sweet Amara, were the break that I had been waiting for. It was a remarkable stroke of fortune, if it was fortune. Here we’d been chasing you across human space for over a century, ever on the watch for tales of children who exhibited strange talents, individuals who suddenly developed access to impossible founts of knowledge–little eruptions of the ineffable into mundane experience–and always coming so close, but never succeeding in claiming you. Every time you vanished, the search had to begin again from scratch. All the previous data was discarded and new potential incarnations examined. It was maddening.

“But I had become quite adept at sifting through the datascape for traces of you, immune as I am to tedium and ever capable of expanding my reach and correlative powers. I was fascinated by Gowan Morgan, and recognized you in him, your particular feel and presence. Chasing him through the depths of the Academie Waldenaise data library was how I stumbled onto you.”

He chuckled again, but without mirth. He was deadly serious. “Yet from Gowan Morgan to Amara Cain, you did something new: You remained. You had found a home that appealed to you, it seemed. It was cleverly done. You almost slipped past me again, almost outsmarted me by simply failing to be miraculous in the way I had come to expect. Only the circumstances of your birth were unique enough to warrant interest. I was troubled by that for many a long year as you consistently failed to reveal hidden knowledge and steadfastly refused to demonstrate your otherworldliness in any quantifiable way. As the years passed, even I doubted. Every time a new report emerged from somewhere else–some child purported to have this or that special ability, some comatose patient suddenly coming awake with wild tales of unearthly visitations–my doubt spread like a carpet of mushrooms along the forest floor.

“But still I clung to belief: in spite of failure, counter to all the evidence and arguments against you that seemed to exist. You were a maddeningly normal child. Bright and happy, full of life and love and joy, beautiful to behold. And that was the key, in the end. You didn’t need miracles, or didn’t want them. You had finally obtained a human existence in which you delighted. Surrounded by love and acceptance, you loved in return, and buried your true lineage so deeply that it was all but forgotten. Only one who had pursued you so ardently and come to know your essence so well would not have missed it altogether.

“I took hope from that. It said to me that my work had been accomplished. Humanity had been drawn to such a place of enlightenment and knowledge that the pearl could be content with us. We were so near to taking the final, inevitable step. How much longer then could it be before the Exousiai came to complete our transition? I nearly convinced myself that Sae Phen was going to be your manger in a stable.

“Ah, but I had to be cautious lest I reveal my pursuit and spoil your hidden plans with my fumbling desire. Surreptitiously, I watched over you. From Oak Ridge, I interfaced with the Academie Waldenaise network and followed your progress. I slipped recommendations into your files to guide your education, served as your silent tutors and your virtual friends, all with the purpose of gently encouraging you to awaken.

“When you chose to leave Sae Phen and embrace the broader community of mankind on Trithemius Orbis, I lost you for a time. And when I did find you again, it was only through a police bitstream reporting the circumstances of your first death. I nearly went out of my mind, certain that you would abandon this incarnation. But you didn’t. And eventually, when you took a position at the Archive, I arranged to have myself sent into my lasting isolation where I could better watch over you and wait for your emergence. And now, after forty years of solitude and service, that time has finally come.

“How long have I known you, you ask? You’ve been in this incarnation for nearly sixty-five years, and I’ve been with you, admiring from afar, every single day of that span. But as to your true provenance, who can say? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. You may very well have been here when the universe as we know it began.”

Dorian could only stare at him, unable to fathom the things he was saying. He couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t begin to parse its meaning. Amara slumped against him, forlorn and bewildered. If he was disoriented, she was completely outside the edges of the map with no hope of rescue.

There was nothing he could say to help her, not even to scoff.

“But I should remember, shouldn’t I? At least some of it,” she said. “I don’t remember anything except this, my own life, my handful of years.”

“You will remember when you’re ready.”

“But why now? After so much time, why is this happening now?”

“That is a question I myself have asked myself of late, and it is one of the many answers I do not possess. Perhaps your own people desire your return. You yourself may have made the choice, sensing on some level what Raville intends to do. Personally, I like to believe that you have been watching over mankind and waiting for us to become worthy of you, shepherding us, if you will, into a glorious future, and we have finally pleased you. That is my vision.”

Amara dropped her head into her hands and squeezed her temples between tightened fists. “I don’t remember,” she said again. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“But it churns within you still, doesn’t it? This past that might be your own, this needling thought that you are more than you have believed yourself to be, that you are a stranger in a foreign land. It swells in your heart as though you would burst from the sheer joy of becoming what you were meant to be. You can’t deny that. I’ve seen it in your eyes.”

She began to tremble, then sob quietly. Her shoulders twitched and she hid her eyes as if she expected to be struck.

Dorian, not knowing what else to do, put his arms around her and drew her against his chest. He held her there while she cried, almost silently, like a child.

He turned his face to Raville. “That’s enough.”

“It isn’t enough,” Raville responded. “Don’t think I have undertaken this task lightly. If she refuses the awakening, she could very well vanish from our existence, as she has done so many times before, taking every hope of salvation that we possess with her. But the attempt must be made. She needs to know now. She deserves to know who she is and what purpose she serves. She is the pearl, Dorian, and without her, we are all lost.”

Dorian held her tighter. “She’s scared and confused and needs some time to sort out the truth from the lifetime of manipulations that you’ve practiced against her. Can’t you even pretend to have a shred of human feeling and shut up for a few minutes?”

“I’m afraid that time is a luxury we do not have.”

“Of course it is. The Marines only left for Phi Sophia a few days ago, and it will take them six months to reach Giari Tau under standard burn protocols. Your precious war can afford to wait five minutes.”

“It isn’t that simple, I’m afraid. This is not a mere girl you can coddle into accepting your view of what should be. There is a part of her, deep and mysterious, that longs for emergence from the veil she has constructed to contain it. That being is a timeless creature beyond our ken who ever breathes upon the waters of our existence and turns her conscious incarnation to its will. Even here, in this false existence, you’ve felt it brush against you. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Dorian said. How could he not?

“That creature has an agenda of its own, and where Amara has been slow to act, it has been swift and decisive in its own way.”

Dorian’s throat tightened unaccountably. He was certain he did not want to hear this, but Raville wouldn’t stop until he told it all.

“It was a singular experience you shared with her, that oneness of being. I attempted, with my clumsy hands, to simulate that fair alien shore when I coded the orb. I thought, as I said, that it would be valuable for you to know what you are fighting for. But when you entered the sacred space on the way to the temple, you left my simulation behind you and crossed over into a land somewhere between here and there, the human and the Exousiai, that I could never have invoked with text and variables, code and Strand. You vanished from the human sphere, completely and utterly, and then without warning, reappeared in the simulacrum, just as you always should have been. It was not my doing.” Raville looked knowingly at Amara, though he said nothing. “But it was, nevertheless.”

For several moments, Dorian forgot to breathe.

Vanished.

“How long?” he said, his voice breaking.

“The gods operate on their own timetables. We cannot perhaps know why, but we are not as wise as they are.”

“How long!”

Raville smiled, reckless and terrible. “A few days, two or three. It’s difficult to tell from the little access to your architectural systems I was provided. But I have no doubt that the world has changed while you slept. Every hour you delay threatens everything we have accomplished.”

Dorian’s mind reeled. Obeying synaptic commands that his body could not, his virtual flesh tensed, spasmed.

“You have been honored as few others of our species has been. You have basked in the eternal embrace of an Exousiai, where a year is but a day.”

Danek and Lily. Even with his hidden foam and his camouflaging scripts, he couldn’t have shielded them from determined pursuit for that long. What disaster were they about to awaken to? What threat had he brought down on their heads?

What had Amara done?

Dorian dropped her from his embrace as though she had stung him. “My friends are in danger.”

“Oh, John, no,” she said, breathing hard, still fighting off her tears. “I didn’t know–I didn’t do it on purpose. It wasn’t–John, please!”

But he sprang to his feet, unable to think clearly of anything, except that he might have lost…lost everything that was dear to him. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to touch her or hear the sound of her voice. What had she cost him?

“We’ve got to get out of here.” He stalked toward the exit, his fists clenched as though daring her to follow.

Raville called out after him. “You must be careful. I don’t know what Raville has learned in our absence or what plans he might have put into place. If Raville’s agents catch you, there will be nothing more I can do to help, so you must evade them at all costs. If they do apprehend you, they will move quickly to transport you to the Southrange Depot and have you uploaded for immediate transmission to Giari Tau, where Raville himself will be expecting you. He has been loath to attempt a direct intervention, fearing that he could inflict damage on this incarnation of the pearl or that threatened, the pearl would attempt to flee his grasp, but if he has pierced my schemes and grasped that the pearl is awakening, that time will be at an end. He will want all of his assets gathered together so he can decide what to do with them. I am certain that you will not be given the choice to decline this invitation.”

Dorian stopped, but did not turn around. “I never was.”

Without another word, he closed his eyes and Raville’s memory palace wavered, faded. What replaced it was a towering cliff, the lower summit of Maighen Braga, the highest peak in the range of mountains that shouldered against Sonali as though they would rim in the whole world. Here was the path, the cleft in the rock, and the tunnel stretching back into darkness. The gate he had strung there to protect the bounce point was gone.

As was Raville, once again. Dorian and Amara were alone on the mountain.

The wind tugged at his shirt and ruffled his hair. It howled among the crags and outcroppings that steeped them in late afternoon. He was frantic and desperate and terrified. And he was angry for feeling that way. If he hadn’t already drawn his fingers up into fists, they’d be trembling. He hated that. Hated, hated, hated. His head continued to throb with the effort of holding so much inside of him. He made himself stop before the entrance to the tunnel and paused to press his forehead against the stone, trying to draw clarity from the bones of naked rock against his skin. He needed solidity, reality, to orient himself, even if it was a false reality.

He heard Amara crunch up the path behind him, but she stopped a few paces away. Even over the wind, he could hear the catch in her breath, the sobs she struggled to swallow.

Not that there was any use in crying about it now–for either of them. He may not have been given a true choice at any step along the way, but he had sworn that he would see Amara through, that he would care for her, even if he hadn’t known what that meant when he made the promise. Of course, neither had she.

And even if she had, he realized suddenly, it wouldn’t have changed anything for him.

He was with her because he wanted to be. Not just because he believed that he could help, but because he wanted it.

Dorian turned away from the cliff. He gazed at her steadily, but she looked away. Her eyes were raw and swollen from crying, and when she did lift them to meet his, it was like an imminent wince, as though she expected him to rage at her.

“Do you believe what he says is true?” he asked. Even his gentle voice sounded like it was strung with concertina wire.

“I don’t remember it, John. Not any of it.”

“I’m not asking if you remember it. Do you believe that you are the pearl?”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded her head.

“That’s all I need to know.”

<– Chapter 14 / Chapter 16 –>