Context (78 page)

But dead Rafael’s plexcore array—networked
by mu-space comms—was not destroyed. Some—or all, depending on the account—remained
undetected.

My talisman...

Tom touched his chest, feeling
the stallion beneath his tunic. In some ways, it formed a link to that ancient
tale, in ways he had not considered before.

‘After the disembodied Rafael’s
two centuries of slumber’—the speaker cleared his throat—‘it was, as Xiao Wang
says, time for the Dark God finally to awaken

At
the time of Rafael’s birth, Fulgor was a bright and shining republic, an
intellectual Utopia, where commercial empires flourished and died in seconds—inside
Fulgor’s rich, consensual alternate reality: the virtual Skein.

And the Luculenti reached levels
of intellectual ability which would never be seen again—or at least, not until
Nulapeiron’s nobility refined their logotropic techniques in a distant place
and time.

But, although it took two hundred
Standard Years, the strange, dark fragments of the former Rafael’s distributed
consciousness slowly resurfaced in Skein. Slowly, slowly, they began a process
of malevolent rebirth: the central theme of Xiao Wang’s epic work.

From strange, fractured,
dislocated beginnings, those shards of evil linked together, spreading and
growing in Skein, eventually to coalesce into something infinitely blacker,
more mysterious, and totally implacable.

Small numbers at first, then
large groups of Luculenti fell under its sway, were absorbed into darkness, as
the days of the eponymous Skein Wars began.

There was heroism, among the élite
and ordinary people both, as they fought back against the spread of evil. Many
sacrificed everything for the sake of the greater good, so that Utopian days
might be seen again by others.

Xiao Wang chronicled their
valour, the outstanding intellectual effort of their campaigns: the days of the
counter-Skein, brilliant twin to the corrupted virtual world; of the
de-programming viruses they unleashed in Skein and in reality.

His work,
as a commentator’s foreword said,
speaks to the warrior spirit in us all.

But, ultimately, it was about the
tragic fall of a once-bright society, a doomed struggle, as decades-long
campaigns failed one by one, and whole populations died or melded into a vast
something
that was not remotely human, a planetwide blackness Destined to remain
forever.

It was the Fulgor Anomaly.

Then
a strange alteration came over the speaker’s manner. He stood taller, his
fidgeting ceased, and when he spoke his voice was softer but more commanding.

‘My real name is Strostiv.’ He
looked around the chamber. ‘And I have a particular reason for inviting you
today. Everyone here has been carefully chosen, according to criteria I will
not discuss at this time.’

Tom sat up straighter, and looked
at Anrila who winked, before returning her attention to Strostiv.

‘You will already have noticed’—a
smile flitted across Strostiv’s face, was gone—‘broad similarities, as well as
important differences, between the Anomaly’s genesis and our own situation. Of
course, we have long abandoned the dangerous and ultimately corrupting practice
of immersion in artificial realities.’

Strostiv’s gaze tracked across
his audience.

Tom could have mentioned
zentropes—on the subject of corrupt technologies—but held his silence.

‘That closes off one potential
weakness. But the Blight has many more techniques at its disposal.’

Everyone was paying rigid
attention, now that myth was explicitly linked to contemporary menace.

‘My Lord Corcorigan, some years
back, you delivered an interesting exposition on the nature of timeflow. Would
you care to repeat that now?’

Tom grew very still.

He had been almost too frightened
to see straight at the time, but this Strostiv could be one of them: the trio
of Lords Academic who had recommended his promotion to Lordship.

‘Yes,’ he said, rising. ‘It would
be my pleasure.’

There were people with stronger
logosophical backgrounds than Tom Corcorigan in this chamber, for sure ...But
none that would have meddled in the forbidden areas, or brought a clumsy energy
to inquiries unhindered by the complex, careful scholarship which had gone
before.

This time, he would make his
exposition shorter and to the point.

It was no longer logosophy, but
military strategy, which was important now.

Quickly:

‘Assume that space is flat — just
pretend it’s a disk, all right?’

A holo almost-sphere, elongated
towards the ends, appeared at his gestured command.

“This is the lifetime of the
universe: starting at a point’ -Tom indicated one end—‘then growing to a
maximum’—the middle—‘and shrinking to the Big Crunch.’

He looked at Strostiv, who gave a
small ironic smile.

I’m working from incomplete
knowledge. I didn’t know that eight years ago, but I do now.

Tom continued:

‘The Sakharov-Gold Principle,
from ancient times, links the direction of time with cosmic expansion.
Therefore, by symmetry, there are
two
Big Bangs, and time flows towards
the Centre Time, the phase transition. And there’s no way to distinguish which
half of the cosmic history we’re in.’

The audience were giving him
their full attention. These were areas that bright minds must have speculated
on, for all that discussions were discouraged.

“The interesting thing’—he looked
to Strostiv: no reaction—‘is that Centre Time. In fact, even if the cosmos
continued to expand forever’—Strostiv shook his head: that could not happen—‘the
principle remains.’

Tom caused a vertical plane,
through the centre of his holo model, to sparkle with pinpricks of scarlet
light.

‘Does time flip over in one
instant of contextual metatime? Or are there seedpoints of time-reversal,
spreading out to engulf the cosmos?’

This was more than the young Tom
Corcorigan had talked about. But it was something he wanted people to know.

‘If you could emulate the Centre
Time conditions, then you would produce regions, perhaps micro-regions, of
negative timeflow, such as ...’

Tom paused here—some speculations
were most definitely forbidden—but Strostiv made no comment, so he pressed on
to make his final point.

‘... such as obtains inside
Oracular minds.’

He sat down amid a heavy silence.

‘I’m
not going to comment,’ said Strostiv, ‘on the processes which produce an
Oracle.’

It sounded as though he could, if
he chose to. That made Tom wonder what Strostiv did when he was not
interviewing nervous young would-be Lords.

‘But the Blight is most certainly
interested in those procedures.’

Then the lecture hall grew dark,
and the true point of this gathering became apparent.

Black
space, and a roughly cylindrical richness of stars: a section of one galactic
spiral arm. One star glowed amber: Nulapeiron’s own system.