But that’s impossible. Futurity had never negotiated with an armed fugitive before, but he had heard many confessions, and he knew the value of patience, of indirection. ‘We’ll come to that,’ he said. ‘My name is Futurity’s Dream. I live on the planet below, which is Base 478. Our government is called the Ecclesia.’
‘You’re a priest.’
He said reflexively, ‘Just an acolyte, my child.’
She laughed at him openly now. ‘Don’t call me a child! I’m a mother myself.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. But in his peripheral vision he checked over the manifest details again. She was travelling alone; there was definitely no mention of a child either on the ship or back at Chandra. Don’t contradict, he told himself. Don’t cross-examine. Just talk. ‘You’ll have to help me through this, Mara. Are you of the faith yourself?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffed. ‘Not of your sort, though.’
Since the fall of the Coalition, the religion Futurity served, known as the ‘Friends of Wigner’, had suffered many schisms. He forced a smile. ‘But I will have to do,’ he said. ‘The Captain turned to my Hierocrat for help. Mara, you must see that to sort out this situation you will have to talk to me.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I have to talk. That’s obvious. But not to an acolyte. Or a priest, or a bishop, or a, a—’
‘A Hierocrat.’ He frowned. ‘Then who?’
‘Michael Poole.’
That ancient, sacred name shocked Futurity to brief silence. He glanced at Captain Tahget, who raised his eyebrows. You see what I’ve been dealing with? Perhaps this woman was deluded after all.
Futurity said, ‘Mara, Michael Poole is our messiah. In the age of the First Friends he gave his life for the benefit of humanity by—’
‘I know who he was,’ she snapped. ‘Why do you think I asked for him?’
‘Then,’ he said carefully, ‘you must know that Poole has been dead - or at least lost to us - for more than twenty-three thousand years.’
‘Of course I know that. But he’s here.’
‘Poole is always with us in spirit,’ said Futurity piously. ‘And he waits for us at Timelike Infinity, where the world lines of reality will be cleansed.’
‘Not like that. He’s here, on Base—’
‘478.’
‘478. You people keep him locked up.’
‘We do?’
‘I want Michael Poole,’ Mara insisted. ‘Only him. Because he will understand.’ She turned away from Futurity. The imaging system followed her, but she covered her face with her hands, so he couldn’t read her expression.
Captain Tahget said dryly, ‘I think you need to talk to your Hierocrat.’
II
The Hierocrat refused to discuss such issues on a comms link, so Futurity would have to return to the surface. Within the hour Futurity’s flitter receded from the starship.
From space the Ask Politely was an astonishing sight. Perhaps a kilometre in length it was a rough cylinder, but it lacked symmetry on any axis, and its basic form was almost hidden by the structures which plumed from its surface: fins, sails, spines, nozzles, scoops, webbing. Hardened for interstellar space the ship shone, metallic and polymeric. But it had the look of something organic rather than mechanical, a form that had grown, like a spiny fish from Base 478’s deep seas perhaps, rather than anything designed by intelligence.
There was something deeply disturbing about the ship’s lack of symmetry. But, Futurity supposed, symmetry was imposed on humans by the steady straight-up-and-down gravity fields of planets. If you swam between the stars you didn’t need symmetry.
And besides, so the seminary gossip went, despite the controlling presence of Tahget and his command crew, this wasn’t really a human vessel at all. It certainly didn’t look it, close to.
Futurity was relieved when his flitter pulled out of the ship’s forest of spines and nets and began to swing back down towards Base 478.
478 was a world of ruins: from the high atmosphere the land looked as if it had been melted, covered over by a bubbling concrete-grey slag. Once every resource of this world had been dedicated to the prosecution of a galactic war. Base 478 had been a training centre, and here millions of human citizens had been moulded into soldiers, to be hurled into the grisly friction of the war at the Galaxy’s heart, from whence few had returned. Even now the world retained the number by which it had been registered in vanished catalogues on Earth.
But times had changed. The war was over, the Coalition fallen. Many of those tremendous wartime buildings remained - they were too robust to be demolished - but Futurity made out splashes of green amid the grey, places where the ancient buildings had been cleared and the ground exposed. Those island-farms laboured to feed 478’s diminished population. Futurity himself had grown up on such a farm, long before he had donned the cassock.
He had never travelled away from his home world - indeed, he had only flown in orbit once before, during his seminary training; his tutor had insisted that you could not pretend to be a priest of a pan-Galactic religion without at least seeing your own world hanging unsupported in the Galaxy’s glow. But Futurity had studied widely, and he had come to see that though there were far more exciting and exotic places to live in this human Galaxy - not least Earth itself - there were few places quite so orderly and civilised as his own little world, with its proud traditions of soldiery and engineering, and its deeply devout government. So he had grown to love it. He even liked the layers of monumental ruins that plated over every continent, for in the way they had been reoccupied and reused he took a lesson about the durability of the human spirit.
But a world so old hid many secrets. After his flitter had landed - and as the Hierocrat led him to a chamber buried deep beneath the Ecclesia’s oldest College - Futurity felt his soul shrink from the suffocating burden of history.
And when Michael Poole opened his eyes and faced him, Futurity wondered which of them was the most lost.
The room was bare, its walls a pale, glowing blue. Its architecture was tetrahedral, a geometry designed respectfully to evoke an icon of Michael Poole’s own past, the four-sided mouths of the wormholes the great engineer had once built to open up Sol system. But those slanting walls made the room enclosing: not a chapel, but a cell.
The room’s sole occupant looked up as Futurity entered. He sat on the one piece of furniture, a low bed. Futurity was immediately reminded of Mara, in another plainly furnished room, similarly trapped by her own mysterious past. The man was bulky, small - smaller than Futurity had imagined. His hair was black, his eyes dark brown. He looked about forty, but this man came from an age of the routine use of AntiSenescence treatments, so he could be any age. The muscles of his shoulders were bunched, and his hands were locked together, big, powerful engineer’s hands. He looked tense, angry, haunted.
As Futurity hesitated, the man fixed him with an aggressive gaze. ‘Who in Lethe are you?’ The language was archaic, and a translation whispered softly in Futurity’s ear.
‘My name is Futurity’s Dream.’
‘Futurity—?’ He laughed out loud. ‘Another infinity-botherer. ’
It shocked Futurity to have this man speak so casually heretically. But he had had enough of being cowed today, and he pulled himself together. ‘You are on a world of infinity-botherers, sir.’
The man eyed him with a grudging respect. ‘I suppose I can’t argue with that. I didn’t ask to be here, though. Just you remember that. So I know who you are. Who am I?’
Futurity took a deep breath. ‘You are Michael Poole.’
Poole raised his hand, and turned it back and forth, studying it. Then he stood up and without warning aimed a slap at Futurity’s cheek. Poole’s fingers broke up into a cloud of pixels, and Futurity felt nothing.
‘No,’ Poole murmured. ‘I guess you’re wrong. Michael Poole was a human being. Whatever I am it isn’t that.’
For a second Futurity couldn’t speak. He tried to hold himself together against this barrage of shocks.
To Futurity’s surprise, Poole said, ’Sorry. Perhaps you didn’t deserve that.’
Futurity shook his head. ‘My needs don’t matter.’
‘Oh, yes, they do. Everything goes belly-up if you forget that.’ He cast about the tetrahedral cell. ‘What’s a man got to do to get a malt whisky around here? … Oh. I forgot.’ He looked up into the tetrahedron’s squat spire, and held out his hand, cupping it. In a moment a glass appeared, containing a puddle of amber fluid. Poole sipped it with satisfaction. Then he dipped his fingers in the drink, and flicked droplets at Futurity. When they hit the acolyte’s cassock, the droplets burst apart in little fragments of light. ‘Consistency protocols,’ Poole murmured. ‘How about that? Why am I here, Futurity’s Dream? Why am I talking to you - why am I conscious again?’
Futurity said bluntly, ‘I need your help.’
Poole sat down, sipped his drink, and grunted. ‘More of your decadent dumb-ass theology?’
‘Not theology,’ Futurity said evenly. ‘A human life.’
That seemed to snag Poole’s attention. But he said, ‘How long this time?’
Futurity, briefed by the Hierocrat, knew exactly what he meant. ‘A little more than a thousand years.’
Poole closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ‘You bastards, ’ he said. ‘I’m your Virtual Jesus. A simulacrum messiah. And I wasn’t good enough. So you put me in memory store, a box where I couldn’t even dream, and left me there for a thousand years. And now you’ve dug me up again. Why? To crucify me on a wormhole mouth, like the first Poole?’
Futurity was growing irritated. ‘I know nothing of Jesus, or crucifying. But I always thought I understood Michael Poole.’
‘How could you? He’s been dead twenty millennia.’
Futurity said relentlessly, ‘Then perhaps I misjudged his character. We didn’t bring you back to harm you. We didn’t bring you back for you at all. You’re here because somebody in trouble is asking for your help. Maybe you should think about somebody other than yourself, as Michael Poole surely would have done.’
Poole shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Are you trying to manipulate me?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’
Poole sipped his unreal whisky. Then he sighed. ‘So what’s the problem?’
III
Poole had no physical location as such; he ‘was’ where he was projected. It would have been possible for him to be manifested aboard the Ask Politely by projection from the Ecclesia’s underground caches. But Poole himself pressed for the data that defined him to be downloaded into the ship’s own store, as otherwise lightspeed delays would introduce a barrier between himself and this fragile woman who was asking for his help.
What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.
It took a day for the Ecclesiast authorities to agree transfer protocols with Captain Tahget and his crew. Futurity, no specialist in such matters, found this delay difficult to understand, but it turned out that Poole’s definition was stored at the quantum level. ‘And you can transfer quantum information, ’ Poole said, ‘but you can’t copy it. So your monks can’t make a backup of me, Futurity, any more than they can of you. Kind of reassuring, isn’t it? And that’s why the monks are twitchy.’ But Poole was furious that the Ecclesiasts ensured that Tahget understood they owned the copyright in him and would protect their ‘intellectual property’ against ‘piracy’. ‘Copyright! In me! What do they think I am, a worm genome?’
Meanwhile, Captain Tahget was insulted by the very suggestion of piracy, and he complained about the delays for which nobody was compensating him, not to mention the risk of allowing the unstable situation of a woman with a bomb aboard his ship to continue for so long.
These transactions seemed extraordinary to Futurity, and terribly difficult to cope with. After all, when he had first gone up to the orbiting starship, Futurity hadn’t even known this simulacrum of Michael Poole existed.
Virtual Poole was the deepest secret of the Ecclesia, his Hierocrat had said. Indeed, an acolyte as junior as Futurity shouldn’t be hearing any of this at all, and the Hierocrat made it clear he blamed Futurity for not resolving the starship situation without resorting to this: in the Hierocrat’s eyes, Futurity had failed already.
It had begun fifteen hundred years ago. It had been an experiment in theology, epistemology and Virtual technology, an experiment with roots that reached back to the establishment of the Ecclesia itself.
Poole himself knew the background. ‘I - or rather, he, Michael Poole, the real one - has become a messiah figure to you, hasn’t he? You infinity-botherers and this strange quantum-mechanical faith of yours. You had theological questions you thought Poole could answer. Your priests couldn’t dig him up. And so you made him. Or rather, you made me.’
Technicians of the ancient Guild of Virtual Idealism had deployed the most advanced available technology to construct the Virtual Poole. Everything known about Poole and his life and times had been downloaded, and where there were gaps in the knowledge - and there were many - teams of experts, technical, historical and theoretical, had laboured to extrapolate and interpolate. It had been a remarkable project, and somewhat expensive: the Hierocrat wouldn’t say how much it cost, but it seemed the Ecclesia was still paying by instalments.