But he had felt longing, sadness. The tech wanted only to destroy. It urged him constantly to action; it reveled in sympathetic vibration with the Eye. Razeel had said the tech spoke to her of chaos, of a universe reborn in fire and blood. Those golden strands bound them to darkness; even now he felt their burning desire. Yet that was the Shadows' will, he realized. It arose from their programming, not the tech itself. Of the tech, he knew nothing.
Perhaps it loved destruction no more than an archaeologist named Anna Sheridan once had. If that was so, could those fleeting sensations reflect what a true connection to the tech would feel like, below the level of the Shadows' programming, below the drives to chaos and destruction?
He searched for the sensation within himself, but he could hear only the echo of his own desperation, just as he heard the echo of his commands. His tech reflected his thoughts, awaited his orders. He controlled it well.
Burell had described the relationship. The tech developed like a second nervous system. It grew to reflect him, to echo him, mirroring his patterns of thought. It carried his DNA, and other, unknown DNA. It was partly him, and yet it was more than him, an extremely advanced organic technology carrying great energies and capabilities. Microcircuitry in the cytoplasm and on the cell membranes directed the growth and functioning of the implants, imposed control on each cell. The programming structured the relationship between mage and tech, contaminated it.
With the Eye, the programming was even stronger, irresistible. Yet what if the tech could be reached directly, instead of through the programming? Could the Shadows' will be bypassed? If it could, what would he find? Could the tech, like Anna, once have felt its own desires, dreamed its own dreams?
He had been trapped in his thinking, just as when he'd considered destroying the transceiver within his body. He had believed all along that only two possibilities existed: control his tech, or succumb to it. What if there was a third way? Was there some way of truly joining with the tech, as Blaylock had always said? Was there a way to open himself to it, to communicate with it rather than repress it? To learn its true desires? Not the Shadows'. Not his own. Could he free that which he had worked endlessly to enslave?
He had been unable to fine the person within the hybrid ship. He had attempted to free Morden only to find that Morden did not want to be freed. The Shadows had freed Anna, but there had been nothing left of her to free. Would the tech be the same? Galen paced back and forth in the small white prison in his mind.
Blaylock had always believed that unity would come through perfect mastery, perfect discipline, perfect control. Control had brought Galen no closer to the tech, only to the Shadows' programmed drives and desires. In wailing up those desires, he had walled up himself. Whether one was master or slave, one was not free. He had been on the wrong path.
Elric had told him.
You expend all your energy on maintaining control, on containing the monster. You focus on a single piece of yourself, and neglect or bury the rest.
Control was not the solution.
Perhaps there was no escape from the Eye, from the Shadows' plan. He had failed again and again in his task: failed to kill the three he had set out to kill, failed to destroy the Eye. He would like to make one last attempt to do good. But he didn't know how.
You have chosen certainty over uncertainty, declaring yourself a monster. Certainty brings order, which you have always desired. But life, as you have discovered, is not always orderly.
His path was no longer clear. He couldn't simply relinquish control.
If he did, the force of the Eye would take over. Besides, he didn't think he knew how anymore. He needed to find some way to tap into the tech, as he tapped into the Shadow communications. To hear it, if there was anything to hear beyond the Shadows' programming. And to allow it to act. But how?
With a vertiginous twist he was back in stifling blackness, wrapped in countless arms and legs, buried in layer upon layer of machine people. The Eye had pulled him from the incantation.
Five seconds.
The brilliant energy poured from him in pulsing waves, endless, overwhelming.
Four.
Three.
As thoughts of destruction flooded through him, Galen withdrew further and further into his exercises, desperate to find an answer. The Shadows imposed their programming, their basic postulates onto the tech. All the mages' spells were built on those. If there was a spell to access the tech itself, it must be something even more simple, more basic. What could be more simple than an equation with only one term?
A sensation intruded – far above, movement. The force of his will fell upon it. The White Star.
It had begun its descent. It carried elements of Vorlon technology. It was an atrocity. It was a threat to their home, and he must destroy it. A target, at last, for the brilliant orb that he had become, for the blazing web of his malice. In war those unfit were exterminated. In war he was victorious, and through war true perfection would be realized. The thrill bloomed through him. He tried to force the Eye's attention away, but he could not avert his gaze. He could not allow the ship to pass. Even as he struggled to do so, he directed the weapons platforms in orbit to lock on to this target.
Then the answer came to him. An equation with no terms. A spell that demanded nothing, in which neither was master, neither slave. A spell that simply opened a door, a door to the wellspring of darkness.
The Shadows had given the mages this Trojan Horse, and what was inside, he did not know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps even greater destruction. Was he a fool, thinking that from the Shadows anything good could come? He had spent his life in the pursuit of order. Now it was time for uncertainty. It was time for chaos. In a second the White Star would be at optimum distance from the weapons platforms, and he would direct them to fire.
He narrowed his focus. At the end of the dark, suffocating tunnel of his control, he visualized a blank screen. Upon it, he conjured... nothing. At the center of the brilliant, pulsing orb of his body, something shifted. The rhythm of the machine's beat stumbled. It made an awkward attempt at recovery, squeezed out a few, irregular beats, then stalled in a fixed, stagnant light.
Along the machine's far edges, the jaundiced, yellow web faded into darkness, and that darkness spread silently inward, the web shrinking, failing, until it reached the burning orb of his being, and that too began to fade, contracting as if a black hand closed around him, until his fire was extinguished.
Stillness.
With a convulsion his heart seemed to burst open, and he thought that the Circle's device had been triggered. But instead of pain, well-being poured down the lines of his tech, a brilliant, pale yellow luminescence that carried no fire but a deep, relaxing warmth, reaching up his spine and curling in intricate coils through his brain, spreading in an embrace across his shoulders, stretching down his arms. It did not race or chum. It simply inhabited him, its warmth diffusing out from the threads of tech, permeating muscles, tissue, blood, neurons, pervading him, blending into him.
The tech knew everything he'd ever thought, everything he'd ever felt, everything he'd ever dreamed – it shared all those things – and it wanted to show them to him. And as it joined with him, it pulled him forward, down that endless tunnel within which he had retreated, until the fist of his will at last slackened its grip, the exercises, one by one, fell still, the walls peeled away, and he came out into the open, where all that he had hidden from survived, not threats to himself, as he had thought, but pieces of himself, of who he was, and he accepted them all, the pain and the beauty, the betrayals and the loyalties, the hatred and the love, the failures and the successes, the past and the future, the darkness and the light.
He was filled with a sense of unity, completeness. They felt it together, the sensation resounding through him, not as thought and echo, or command and confirmation, but as a single being. The tech was him, yet it was more than him. And at the same time, it was more primal, himself reduced to his most basic essence – as simple as a photon, and as simple as the universe. It wanted to understand. That was all.
It wanted to understand. Who. What. Why.
In a wave the feeling expanded, the pale yellow light spreading from his body into the simpler bits of tech in the machine people, suffusing them. Unlike his tech, those lesser pieces were not developed enough to have complex thoughts of their own. Yet he felt their burden ease, felt their elation.
The warmth continued, reaching up from the depths of Z'ha'dum through shafts and channels, pouring out through the fingers of stone that stretched into the sky. It was all a part of him, and he was a part of it. A great rush of freedom resounded through them. The Shadows enslaved them no longer. They stretched farther, toward the Shadows' soldiers and ships, but those pieces of tech remained beyond the reach of their pale yellow light.
Although they were free, still the Shadows enslaved others, and would continue as long as possible. Through Galen, they knew what must be done. Though they wanted to live, they wanted more to end the great atrocities performed here. They were joined of purpose, power, and desire. The White Star reached optimum distance, and as one, the Eye turned away.
C
HAPTER 19
Far above, the White Star plunged toward Z'ha'dum. In thirty seconds it would reach them. It was time now to finish his task. Galen must make sure that Elizar and Razeel did not retreat to the safety of some hidden shelter.
He must make sure that everything that needed to be destroyed was destroyed. Their sacrifice must not be in vain. The machine people released him, yet their connection to him remained. Physical contact, somehow, was no longer necessary. Barely had Galen thought to conjure a platform below himself than one gained substance beneath his feet. He had not visualized the equation, yet the tech had known what he wanted, had wanted the same thing at the same time.
Rather than him commanding and the tech complying with a subservient echo, the thought had resounded simultaneously through them both. Now, as he thought to propel himself upward, he began to move. Issuing the command was no longer necessary. If it could be done, and if he and the tech agreed it should be done, then it would be done. The machine people cleared the way for him, and he shot upward with increasing speed.
He burst up out of the pit, recognizing Elizar's black figure standing at its rim, Razeel hovering above him, one arm and leg remaining, her body riddled with holes.
As Galen saw them, they raised their palms, and their twin beams of redness struck him, slamming him back into something, hard. It was a platform, and the beams pinned him against it, centered on his heart. The plasma burned into the Shadow skin, drawing from it a dull red glow. Galen did not want to cast the spell of destruction, did not want to risk inviting the Shadows' contaminated light inside him again. All he need do was keep Elizar and Razeel in the cavern until the White Star arrived. The bombs would do the rest.
Elizar sent a message.
What did you do? How did you escape the Eye? It can't be done.
Heat built over Galen's chest as Elizar glided closer, patterns of gray and black shifting over his face. Still Elizar searched for secrets of power. To learn those secrets, he had tortured, had enslaved, had murdered, beginning with the one who had hurt more than all the rest, the one whose name and image had been buried for so long that it made the memory of her loss all the more acute. Isabelle.
The anger resounded through him, through the Eye, which had watched as Elizar and Razeel created new tech infected with the Shadows' pestilence, used it to build an army. Behind brother and sister, on the plain, stood ranks of machine people, frozen into stillness, awaiting orders. As the Eye, he felt himself focusing his power on them, commanding them. With a unified, thunderous step, they turned to face the pair.
Razeel and Elizar broke off their attack, and as their beams released him, Galen dropped to the ground. The soldiers raised their palms toward Razeel, midwife at their birth into slavery and fired. Impossibly, Razeel's Shadow skin seemed to protect her from the multitude of converging red beams, and she swooped higher with a triumphant shriek. Her spiky figure now radiated a dull red glow, and as she raised a warding hand, the red quickly built to blinding intensity.
"Stop!" she screamed.
"My beautiful children..."
A dull boom echoed out across the cavern. But for a rain of fleshy chunks that fell to the rocky plain, she was gone.
As Galen climbed to his feet at the lip of the pit, Elizar turned on him. Heat poured off of the glittering black figure.
"If you will not serve" – Elizar's voice trembled with rage – "then I am free, at last, to kill you."
Elizar brought his hand to his face, and with a jerk of his head, loosed a harsh syllable. As the sound dissipated outward, the air became charged, strange, and time turned sluggish. The world around Galen began to redden and darken. Elizar had captured him within a sphere.
But Elizar was not satisfied with that; just as Galen had burned so long to destroy, Elizar now burned. His head jerked again, again, the syllables caught in the elasticity of time, drawn into a long, fluctuating cry.
Spheres took shape in the air around Galen, in the rock behind him; spheres captured one after another of the soldiers. And though Galen no longer burned with the Shadows' heat of destruction, he resounded with anger and grief and passion and outrage – all the emotions from which he had hidden for so long. Elizar had succumbed to chaos, and to the darkness within himself.
Galen would end it. Galen would end him.
He no longer needed to discover the spell to shift the sphere surrounding him; he and the tech simply thought to move it, and the sphere glided across the stone to envelop the glittering black figure.