Short Futures, page 4
“I have a story to tell you, Mr. Damiani,” Mitchell spoke as they walked. “It’s a story that predates not only the existence of humanity but the very existence of this universe. But first you will need a brief lesson in physics. Everyone knows that this universe originated from the expansion of a singularity...the sort of rend in the fabric of spacetime that is at the center of a black hole. What everyone is not aware of is that every singularity, ever black hole in this universe, is the placenta of a baby universe---just as we are living on the inside of a singularity, so are those singularities the outside of other universes.”
“I’ve heard this theory,” Damiani told him. “But as far as I know it’s unprovable---just mathematical speculation at this point.”
“We haven’t proven it,” Mitchell corrected him. “But it is the truth. Universes produce offspring, just like any other living thing, and just as in any other example of natural selection, some are more successful than others. Some physicists have speculated that this explains our existence, that the physical conditions which are ripe for producing black holes, and the baby universes within, are also those which are prime for producing life. But this is not so. Only a minute fraction of the universes produced by this birth process have conditions that are right for life---and the development of life in a naturally occurring universe is miraculously rare. Which brings us to the story I have to tell.”
They turned down one last corridor, one so long Andre couldn’t see the end.
“So long ago that the very concept of time has no meaning, a life bearing universe developed by chance, and in this universe evolved a race of beings which managed to survive the pitfalls of intelligence and develop a technology that makes ours seem as the stone tools of the Homo Habilis by comparison. This race realized what a tragedy it was that so few universes gave birth to life, to intelligence, and they sought a manner to make this right. They needed a tool to grow universes which would not only contain intelligence but which would be intelligent, be complex enough to actually be considered a living thing.
“For a hundred thousand years they tried to build this tool, beginning with simple mechanisms for creating black holes out of existing stars, but they lacked any sort of control, any way of assuring that the universe they were creating would bear the fruits of life. Until finally, they stumbled upon the key, and built a...device, I suppose, though the word is hardly adequate.”
“The Gate of Dreams,” Damiani mumbled with a sort of shocked acceptance. He wasn’t sure what shocked him more, Mitchell’s story or the fact that he believed it.
“This device imposed a pattern upon the created universe, a living pattern drawn directly from the brain patterns of sentient creatures. It did have one drawback, however, but one that was unavoidable---to impose this pattern on the new universe required an act of will, one that could only be achieved by a living being. One living, sentient being must sacrifice its corporeal existence for every universe created.”
Andre stopped in his tracks and stared at Mitchell.
“And they did this voluntarily?”
“Are you saying you don’t think it’s a good trade?” Mitchell asked with some amusement, pausing in his pace but not turning back.
Andre ran after him, thoughts churning at the idea of giving up his life to become a god.
“You’re saying they all did this?” He asked breathlessly. “They all sacrificed themselves to create new universes?”
Ahead of them, Andre began to see a strange glimmer, like the sun reflected off the ocean.
“Every one of them,” Mitchell confirmed. “Once it had started, there was no way to stop it. They stopped reproducing, waited till their children had matured enough to make the decision on their own, and then, as a species, committed themselves to this course.”
“Hold on a second, if they created the Gate of Dreams in their universe, how did it wind up in this one?”
The shimmer became a strobe of gentle light as the edges of the doorway became clearer.
“The Gate is not a physical object, though it seems as one,” Mitchell explained. “Rather, it is a wormhole through the fabric not only of this spacetime but in all spacetimes, and in the very nothingness that underlies it all. It has been given form by a twisting of hyperdimensional physics that makes our Transition drive seem pale by comparison. It exists, in different forms, in every universe that has sentient life...and it has a way of finding those individuals and those species which will use it.”
“So the Predecessors...”
“Used it. The last of the Predecessors went through the Gate a thousand years ago.”
Damiani felt himself physically deflate. Somehow, he had always held out the hope he would actually meet the Predecessors face to face, ask them all the questions that had dogged him since his youth. Yet somehow that seemed incredibly naive, given that what Mitchell was saying was true. The Predecessors were nothing but the latest in a chain of predecessors that led back not to the distant past of this galaxy but beyond the reach of spacetime itself to another universe. And for once in his life, he felt small and insignificant.
Damiani fell into a subdued silence as they finally reached the end of the corridor, passing through into a chamber so huge he was halfway convinced it couldn’t fit under the mountain. Its walls were polished crystal, shimmering in reflection of the object at the center. But for that, the massive chamber was empty, as if anything else would detract from the silent grandeur of the Gate.
For that was what it surely was, Damiani thought. There was a...discontinuity in space somewhere at the center of the chamber. Exactly where was hard to pinpoint, as the whole effect seemed unreal, like a phantom glimpsed from the corner of the eye. There were colors in the discontinuity, colors that shouldn’t have been visible to the human eye but somehow were. It gave the impression of a ring shape, and though Damiani couldn’t seem to perceive the center of the ring, by looking away and then quickly glancing at it, he caught the hint of something...absent.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked. “Am I supposed to go into that thing like the Predecessors did?”
“You say ‘supposed to’ as if you had some overarching destiny, Mr. Damiani,” Mitchell chuckled. “None of us have any fate other than that we assign ourselves. You could, indeed, step through the gate and become the god of your own private universe, if that is what you think would fulfill you. Of course, you would be the last being in this universe to do so.”
“The last?” He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“When those mining machines are repaired, your colleague Ms. Wellesley will level this mountain. This installation and everything in it will be buried beneath tons of slag, and no one will ever set foot on this world again.”
“You have all this...” Damiani waved a hand demonstratively. “Can’t you stop them?”
“Of course I could. Through brute force, and at the price of revealing this place’s existence to the government and the Corporate Council.”
“Same difference,” Damiani mumbled.
“Quite.” Mitchell smiled thinly. “Eventually it would come to war, and I would be given the choice of killing to protect this place dedicated to life, or letting it fall into the hands of those who might destroy it out of fear and ignorance.”
Andre regarded him silently for a moment. Here were the secrets of the universe, hell, of all universes, laid out in front of him. Here was the key to his destiny, the one way for him to be as important as he felt he deserved to be. The opportunity to be a god. Who gave a damn what happened after that? He opened his mouth to say as much, but it wouldn’t come out. What came out of his mouth instead, to his great surprise, was: “What can I do?”
What was even more surprising, he meant it.
* * *
“Has there been any sign of him?” Trina Wellesley asked tightly, staring at the command vehicle’s sensor screen.
“Nothing since...” The security officer trailed off, not wanting to bring up the report of Andre Damiani disappearing into the side of a mountain. It had become a sore point with Wellesley.
“Well, he can damn well stay hidden in those goddamned mountains for all the good it will do him,” the Corporate Investigator snorted dismissively. “By tomorrow afternoon, the plasma miners will be online and that mountain will be a heap of slag.”
“I doubled the guard around the repair crews,” the security man assured her. “Just as you ordered.”
“It’s probably a waste of time,” she shook her head, stepping out of the open side door of the vehicle and into a night lit almost to day by the searchlights of the gathered vehicles. All around were bustling security troops, eager to look busy to escape the wrath of Investigator Wellesley, which had assumed prodigious dimensions since the debacle with the plasma miners. “He would be a fool to come back here.”
“Ma’am!” one of the security officers exclaimed, looking up from a monitoring station. “We have a transmission going through the orbital comsat! It’s from Damiani!”
“Who would he be calling?” She frowned.
“Council Headquarters on Earth ma’am,” the officer answered.
“Jam it!”
“Too late, ma’am,” the man shook his head. “He’s using a priority code, and by the time we overrode it, the message would already be gone.”
“What the hell does he think the Council can do for him now?” Wellesley wondered, staring into the night.
“It’s not what they can do for me,” came a voice from somewhere behind her, “but what I can do for them.”
Wellesley whipped around, followed closely by a pair of spotlights and the muzzles of a score of pulse carbines. Standing there like an apparition in the midst of their camp was Andre Damiani, carrying a rock in one hand and something about the size of a suitcase in the other.
“One of you morons grab him!” Wellesley shouted, spurring half a dozen of the CSF troopers into motion.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Damiani cautioned, but the security troops kept coming...until the first of them got within ten meters of him.
The CSF officer dropped face-first to the ground like a pleasure doll with its circuits blown and the others skidded to an awkward halt, glancing back at Wellesley.
“What did you do to him?” She asked, eyes widening.
“The same thing I could do to you if you don’t behave,” Damiani told her with not a trace of the self-satisfied smirk that would have accompanied that warning just twenty-four hours ago.
One of the CSF guards whispered a curse and jerked the trigger of her pulse carbine. Fifty quick-discharge superconductor coils overloaded at once, blowing apart the gun’s magazine in a shower of sparks and throwing the trooper backward head over heels. She jerked spasmodically, smoke pouring from her hands and chest where the electrical energy had seared the soft armor of her uniform.
“It would be best,” Andre confided, “if none of you tried that again.”
“All right, Damiani” Wellesley hissed. “You’ve made your point. I don’t know how you’re doing this, but you’ve got all the cards. What do you want?”
“First off, you’d better get her some medical attention,” he motioned toward the trooper who had tried to shoot him. “She’s going to die in a couple minutes unless you get her heart going again.”
Wellesley looked at him strangely for a moment before nodding to the chief security officer. He grabbed a medical kit from the command vehicle and ran over to the fallen woman.
“As for what I want,” Damiani went on, setting the dull grey case on the ground, “that’s simple.” He slapped a palm against a barely-visible plate on the side of the case and it began to silently unfold like a blooming rose, its metallic petals gleaming with an interior light. “What I want is to give you what you want, Agent Wellesley.”
He gently placed the rock in the center of the device, then stepped back a pace. The light from the segments of the machine intensified slowly but inexorably, forming a perfect hemisphere around the center. It grew so bright it outshone the searchlights yet somehow none of them could look away from it. And then, as quick as an eyeblink, it faded and in the center of the thing was a glowing ingot of pure ore that all of them could recognize by sight.
“Gaia’s Blood,” Trina Wellesley breathed. “Is that what...I mean, it can’t be...”
“It’s pure iridium,” Damiani assured her. “You can test it. If you think I’m conning you, you give me something to put on there, but whatever it is, this thing will turn it into pure iridium. Or pure platinum...or whatever you want.”
“That’s Predecessor tech,” Wellesley declared. “You found a cache of it here, didn’t you?”
He nodded confirmation. “And this is just the handy, portable model. How would you like a matter transmuter the size of a warehouse?” He grinned. “No more plasma miners, no more habitable planets contaminated, no more expensive and inefficient prospecting. Hell, I’ll bet you could even make this puppy turn out antimatter.”
Wellesley looked him in the eye and knew he had won. The transmission to the Council was undoubtedly a report claiming credit for the find, an end run around any attempt by her to hijack it. With a sigh of resignation, she slumped against the side of the command vehicle. “I suppose they’ll give you a seat on the Executive Board for this.”
“A seat?” He smiled broadly at her. “I was thinking something more substantial than that.”
Wellesley swallowed hard at the thought and fell silent.
Andre strolled through the assembled vehicles, away from their beaming spotlights and into the open meadow. He glanced up at the mountain, a hint of envy in his heart. Somewhere up there, Mitchell and the others were taking their turn at godhood. His own journey through the Gate of Dreams would have to wait, for the mantle of guardian had fallen upon him. He would see to it that the Gate remained intact and accessible to those who were called, until someday someone came to take his place. And in the interim, he would dole out enough technology to keep the Council from tearing the planet apart...and perhaps enough to destabilize their stranglehold on the government.
Andre looked up at the stars, remembering what Mitchell had said. How lucky this universe was to have us to appreciate it. But not just this universe...
Author's Note: Another story set in the Birthright universe but written before that novel.
SOUL MATE
Kane shuddered as he felt the darkness of Kennedy’s back streets swallow him up.
He had picked up the tail somewhere among the garish advertising holos of the alien ghetto and dragged it into the crackling cess-fires of the Zone---the territory between the alien section and the forest of faceless warehouses of the industrial district. The Zone was a ghost town of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, relics of failed businesses and shattered dreams---the home of the homeless, the desperate...and the Cult.
They surrounded him, a full dozen of them appearing from the wreckage of the Zone like wraiths from a mist, hauntingly oversized in their powered armor. He thought it ironic that the Purity Cult, devoted to keeping humanity free of the incursion of cybernetics, resorted to encasing themselves in cybernetic exoskeletons to fight their battles. It was a hair’s breadth of distinction from the implants that did the same job beneath his skin, but a distinction for which they were willing to kill.
“What do you want?” he asked calmly, trying to buy time.
“You have defiled your humanity,” one of them chanted, his voice oddly distorted by the armor’s exterior speakers. “You have allowed the taint of the unnatural into your sacred temple.”
He watched them as they circled, their arms moving hypnotically.
“I’m natural,” he protested without emotion, as if reciting a response to their dark litany. “I’m not carrying any bionics.”
“You seek to conceal your sin beneath your skin, blasphemer,” the spokesman discounted his argument. “But you cannot hide it...it shines like a star.”
On infrared anyway, he mused. Through thermal lenses, the tiny isotope power packs that ran his implants would stand out like supernovae.
“So what now?” he sighed. He longed for a gun, but there was no point---anything strong enough to cut through their armor would be impossible to conceal. A quick scan gave him the cold consolation that at least they had limited themselves to edged weapons.
“Do not be afraid,” the tinny voice sounded pleased with itself. “We are the servants of the Lord, sent to do his holy will. There will be no pain---we will make sure that your soul has left its physical shell before we purify your body.”
“Well, thank you all to hell,” Kane murmured, his eyes darting back and forth. He knew they’d been following him; where the hell were they? He couldn’t wait forever...
A flicker of movement through the flames of a trash fire. Again, three more times.
“Enough talk,” the leader of the Cultists declared. There was an ugly, metallic rasp as a curved blade extended from its mount on his forearm, and he took a step toward Kane.
“Bad idea, god-boy.”
The Cultists spun at the high-pitched voice, the clipped-off sing-song idiom telling them who they were facing even before they saw the Skinganger. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but that gave no clue as to how he’d started life: he was carrying a full load of bionics and he didn’t care who knew it. His head was shaven, the better to display the striations of a subcutaneous sensor net laid out just beneath the skin of his scalp and the input jacks set into the skin of his temples. Both of his eyes were obvious cybernetics, glowing red orbs rimmed in metal, his ears were flattened amplification discs and his teeth were sharpened spikes of silvery alloy that gleamed in the light of the cess-fires as he smiled. His plastic vest, decorated with a dizzying array of artistic holograms, was cut to accentuate rather than hide the bare metal of his replacement arms, and where the garment hung open over his chest, Kane could see the metal run abruptly into flesh in an eerie conjunction. He stood, fists on hips, with three others of his kind arrayed on either side of him.
