Pain and numbness had gorged on his torso. His arms began to fail as the swaying reached a peak. Water slopped in over the
narrow gunwale. The flimsy boat turned turtle, dumping him into the Juliffe. He saw bubbles churning past. The rumpled silver
foil of the surface receded. Neural nanonics told him his lungs were filling with water. Pain diminished. His implants were
working again. They couldn’t reach him under water, he was beyond them here. He focused every sensor he had on the bomb whose
weight was dragging him down.
On shore the audience had stopped cheering when their prey (so unsportingly) capsized himself. A groan went up. He’d pay for
that.
Boat crews stopped rowing and slumped over their oars, exhausted and angry. The buccaneer’s sails calmly rolled themselves
up as the sailors hung like listless spiders in the rigging. They stared morosely at the tiny half-sunken boat bobbing about
ahead of them.
Together Durringham’s possessed exerted their power. The river around the hull of Chas Paske’s boat began to ripple energetically.
“Hey look, it’s Moses!” someone yelled from the harbour wall. A laugh ran along the spectators. They clapped their hands and
stomped their feet, a stadium crowd demanding their sporting hero appear. “Moses! Moses! Moses!”
The waters of the Juliffe parted.
Chas felt it happening. His surroundings were getting lighter, pressure was reducing. Below his fingers the bomb’s keyboard
was a glowing ruby chessboard. He typed in the code, refusing to hurry, watching the numbered squares turn green. There was
a loud gurgling sound building all around. Fast-conflicting currents sucked at him, twisting his lifeless legs about. Then
the rucked surface came rushing down to seek him out. Too late.
The kiloton nuke detonated at the bottom of a twenty-metre crater in the river. Its initial blast pulse was punched straight
up into the core of the transplanarity ferment raging above. A solar fireball arose from the water with splendid inevitability,
and the entire river seemed to lift with it. Energy in every spectrum poured outwards, smashing solid matter apart. None of
those lining the harbour wall really knew what was happening. Their stolen bodies disintegrated before the nerve impulses
could reach the brain. Only after annihilation, when the possessing souls found themselves back in the bestial beyond, did
the truth dawn. Two seconds after the bomb exploded, a forty-metre wall of water moving at near-sonic speed slammed into Durringham.
And the dead, ensconced in their beautiful new mansions and fanciful castles, died again in their tens of thousands beneath
the usurping totem of the radiant mushroom cloud.
With his enhanced retinas switched to full sensitivity it appeared as though Warlow was flying through a dry iridescent mist.
Ring particles still crawled with wayward spurts of energy; micrometre dust flowed in slow streams around the larger boulders
and ice chunks. Despite the shimmering phosphorescence he was basically flying blind. Occasionally he could catch a glimpse
of stars flickering past his feet, short-lived embers skipping from an invisible bonfire.
After leaving the
Lady Macbeth
he had moved twelve kilometres out from Murora, an orbit which saw him falling behind the sheltering starship. The big dark
sphere, upper hull glinting in the livid red glow from its own thermo-dump panels, had been lost from sight in three minutes.
Isolation had tightened its bewitching fingers almost immediately. Strangely enough, here, where he could barely see ten metres,
a realization of the universe’s vastness was all too strong.
The ten-megaton bomb was strapped to his chest, a fat ovoid seventy-five centimetres high. Weightless, yet weighing heavily
in his heart—titanium and composite device though it was.
Sarha had given him one of the Edenist bitek processor blocks which she had modified with augmentation modules. The idea was
to provide him with a link to Aethra in case the
Gramine
should unexpectedly alter track.
Makeshift, like this whole mission.
“Can I speak with you alone?” he datavised.
“Of course,” the habitat answered. “I would be glad to keep you company. Yours is a fraught task.”
“But it is mine alone.”
“You are the best qualified.”
“Thank you. I wanted to ask you a question on the nature of death.”
“Yes?”
“It involves a small story.”
“Go on. I am always interested to hear of human events. I understand very little of your species so far, even though I have
inherited a wealth of data.”
“Ten years ago I was a crew-member in the starship
Harper’s Dragon
. It was a line cargo ship, nothing special, although the pay was comfortingly regular. We had a new cadet lieutenant join
us on Woolsey, called Felix Barton. He was only twenty, but he had assimilated his didactic courses well. I found him competent,
and a reasonable messmate. He was no different to any other young man starting his career. Then he fell in love with an Edenist
woman.”
“Ah; this is, perhaps, a Shakespearian tragedy?”
Warlow saw thin ribbons of orange dust winding corkscrew fashion around an ice chunk straight ahead; a bird-kite’s tail, he
thought. They sparked pink on his carbotanium space armour as he splashed through. Then he was past them and curving round
a mealy boulder, guidance and optical interpretation programs operating in tandem to steer him automatically around obstacles.
“Not at all. It is a very straightforward story. He simply became besotted. I admit she was beautiful, but then every geneered
human seems to be.
Harper’s Dragon
had a regular contract to supply her habitat with specialist chemicals for one of their electronics manufacturing stations.
After four trips, Felix declared he could not bear to be parted from her. And he was lucky, she felt the same way about him.”
“How fortunate.”
“Yes. Felix left
Harper’s Dragon
and became an Edenist. He had neuron symbionts implanted to give him general affinity, and underwent specialist counselling
to help him adapt. The last time
Harper’s Dragon
visited, I spoke with him, and he was extremely happy. He said he had fitted in perfectly and that she was expecting their
first child.”
“That is nice. There are something like a million and a half Adamists who become Edenists every year.”
“So many? I didn’t know.”
“Seventy per cent are love cases similar to your friend, the rest join because it attracts them intellectually or emotionally.
Over half of the love cases are Adamists who form relationships with voidhawk crew-members, which is only to be expected given
that they have the most contact with Adamists. It leads to many jokes about the voidhawk families having wild blood.”
“So tell me, is the conversion absolute, do these newfound Edenists transfer their memories into the habitat when they die?”
“Of course.”
His neural nanonics displayed a guidance plot, updating his position. Purple and yellow vectors slithered through his head,
temporarily displacing his view of the irradiated dust. He was on course. His course. “Then my question is this. Is it possible
to transfer a person’s memories into a habitat if that person has neural nanonics rather than affinity?”
“I have no record of it ever having been done. Although I can see no reason why not; the process would take longer, however,
datavising is not as efficient as affinity.”
“I want to become an Edenist. I want you to accept my memories.”
“Warlow, why?”
“I am eighty-six, and I am not geneered. My shipmates do not know, but all that is left of my real body is the brain and a
few nerve cords. The rest of me perished long ago. I spent far too much time in free fall, you see.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It has been a full life. But now my neurons are dying at a rate which is beyond even Confederation gene therapy’s
ability to replace. So, understandably, I have come to think a lot about death recently. I had even considered downloading
my memories into a processor array, but that would simply be an echo of myself. You on the other hand are a living entity,
within you I too could continue to live.”
“I would be happy and honoured to accept your memories. But, Warlow, the transference must take place at death, only that
way can continuity be achieved. Anything less would be that echo of self which you spoke of. Your personality would know it
was not complete because its conclusion was missing.”
He flew along a cliff of charcoal-textured rock. A virtual mountain of a particle, worn and abraded by aeons of murmuring
dust, the lethal knife-blade spires unsheathed by its fractured formation now a moorland landscape of undulations, barrows
of its youthful virility. “I know.”
“Are you worried then that Captain Calvert will not be able to escape through the Lagrange point?”
“No. Joshua will be able to fly that manoeuvre with ease. My concern is that he is given the chance to fly it.”
“You mean eliminating the
Gramine
?”
“I do. This mission to mine the rings is the weakest link in Joshua’s plan to escape. It assumes the
Gramine
will not deviate its orbit by more than five hundred metres in the next two hours. It assumes too much. I propose to position
the warhead accurately on
Gramine
’s orbital track, and detonate it while it passes. That way I can be sure.”
“Warlow, neither
Gramine
nor
Maranta
have deviated their track by more than a hundred metres since the search began. I urge you to reconsider this action.”
“Why? I have only a few years to live at best. Most of those would be spent with my memories and rationality slipping away.
Our medical science has achieved too much in that direction. My synthetic body can keep pumping blood through my comatose
brain for decades yet. Would you wish that on me when you know you yourself can provide me with a worthwhile continuance?”
“That is, I believe, a loaded question.”
“Correct. My mind is made up. This way I have two chances of cheating death. There are few who can say that.”
“Two? How so?”
“Possession implies an afterlife, somewhere a soul can return from.”
“You believe that is the fate which has befallen Lalonde?”
“Do you know what a Catholic is?” A solid glacier wall of ice appeared out of the dust. The cold-gas nozzles of his manoeuvring
pack fired heavily. For a moment he saw the splay of waxen vapour shiver as it was siphoned away into the blue and emerald
phosphenes of dust.
“Catholicism is one of the root religions which made up the Unified Christian Church,” Aethra said.
“Almost. Officially, by decree of the Pope, Catholicism was absorbed. But it was a strong faith. You cannot modify and dilute
such an intense devotion simply by compromising prayers and services to achieve unity with other Christian denominations.
My home asteroid was Forli, an ethnic-Italian settlement. It kept the faith, unofficially, unobtrusively. Try as I might,
I cannot throw away the teachings of my childhood. Divine justice is something I think all living things will have to face.”
“Even me?”
“Even you. And Lalonde looks to confirm my belief.”
“You think Kelly Tirrel was telling the truth?”
Warlow’s manoeuvring pack was nudging him gingerly round the rimed iceberg, loyally following the ins and outs of its gentle
contours. Its surface was true crystal, but eventually it sank into total blackness, as though a wormhole interstice had frozen
open at its core. When his armour-suit sensors scanned round they showed him the constellations returning to their full majesty
through the attenuating dust. “I do. I am convinced of it.”
“Why?”
“Because Joshua believes her.”
“A strange rationale.”
“Joshua is more than a superlative captain. In all my years I have never come across anyone quite like him. He behaves execrably
with women and money, and even his friends on occasion. But, if you will excuse my clumsy poetry, he is in tune with the universe.
He knows truth. I put my faith in Joshua, I have done so ever since I signed on with the
Lady Macbeth
, and I will continue to do so.”
“Then there is an afterlife.”
“If not, I will live on as part of your multiplicity. But Kelly Tirrel has been convinced that there is. She is a tough, cynical
person, she would take a lot of convincing such a thing could be. And, as now appears likely, if there is an afterlife, I
have an immortal soul and death is not to be feared.”
“And do you fear death?”
He rose out of the iceberg’s umbra cloak. It was similar to emerging from a dark layer of rain-cloud into clear evening sky,
there was only a remote diaphanous shimmer of dust left above him.
Gramine
shone like a second-magnitude star, forty kilometres away and drifting towards him. “Very much.”
The hovercraft slewed and bucked on the river, tossed about by white-water waves swelling over semi-submerged stones. Theo
was concentrating hard on keeping them straight and level, but it was tough going. Kelly didn’t remember yesterday’s journey
up this same river as being so difficult. She and Shaun Wallace were sitting on the rear bench, clinging on grimly as they
were slung about. The propeller droned behind her.
“Already I feel wearied by the journey, daunted by what we are attempting. This is not even snatching victory from the jaws
of defeat, although it might be termed a last vain attempt to salvage the team’s dignity. We came to this planet with such
confidence and high ideals; we were going to vanquish the evil invader and restore order and stability to twenty million people,
give them their lives back. Now all we dare hope for is to escape with thirty children. And even that will tax us to the limit.”
“Such a worrier, Miss Kelly.” Shaun smiled congenially.
The hovercraft swerved, pushing her against him—for the briefest second the channel to her sensorium flek recorder block dropped
out—and he smiled politely as they righted themselves. “You mean I shouldn’t be worrying?”