“Or almost nothing. There’s Foord.”
“Foord?”
“Foord left me—sorry, left you—on Sakhra while he returned to Earth and enjoyed the glory. But on Sakhra we knew what Srahr had written. We knew what Faith was, and we knew She would always come again. There will always be more Faiths.”
For some reason, the replica paused.
“Was there any more,” Thahl prompted, “about Foord?”
The replica seemed embarrassed; unusual for a Sakhran, even a replica. When it next spoke, its voice was different. Almost apologetic.
“Foord could never stop thinking about Her. Finally he returned to Sakhra, and read the Book. Then he wrote one of his own, which in deference to us he called the Second Book of Srahr, and he did to the Commonwealth what Srahr did to us. When they read what She was they turned away from each other, like we did. Something went from their lives, and they never got it back.”
Cyr fired the beams on full power. The future consumed another millionth of itself, and exploded all the way back to Sakhra.
9
Something unexpected had happened in the Gulf, and Swann was about to feel its first ripples.
When the Charles Manson lifted off from Sakhra, and the strange civil disturbances began, Swann had retreated to his Command Centre at Blentport. Like a dying pharaoh, he had ordered that his staff be buried there with him. Through the days following, it had been full of their noise and movement and smell, and the mounting layers of their detritus. They had grown hot and dirty and tired together, struggling to read things which were unreadable: the disturbances on Sakhra, and the events in the Gulf.
The Command Centre had once been spacious, symmetrical and well-ordered; now it was crowded, not only with people but with chaotic piecemeal additions. The space between its orderly rows of consoles was filled with other consoles. It was walled and even ceilinged with screens, most of them—like the consoles—commandeered from other parts of Blentport. The screens were wide-angle and high-definition, paper-thin so they could be stuck like posters over any spare flat surface. Some of them showed the final stages of Horus Fleet’s deployment round Sakhra, now almost complete, and all the others—except one—showed the civil disturbances.
Sakhra was not being engulfed by some mass uprising—neither Sakhrans nor Sakhran humans did their politics like that—but it was being prodded, here and there, by outbreaks of unease. Swann rubbed his forehead, feeling grit and sweat in his fingers. He was hot and dirty and tired from trying to read unreadable things. The disturbances were bad enough, but the events in the Gulf were worse.
There was one screen in the Command centre, the largest, which showed no images, only binary readouts and schematics and text headups, their windows crowding untidily over each other like a miniature of all the other screens on all the other walls. This was where Swann’s analysts tried to piece together the engagement in the Gulf. All through the days of Swann’s confinement it had been adding and subtracting information, as the analysts did sweep after sweep of their limited and partial data sources, updating them in sequence. The updates moved round the screen like an invisible clock hand, rippling the words and figures as it rearranged them. Each sweep took about a minute; then after thirty seconds the next one began, and the next, as unnoticed as the rise and fall of breathing.
The screen flickered as the latest sweep was completed; then attempted to turn itself inside out as it tried, and failed, to correlate what it had been fed. It went blank, then relit showing only gibberish. It started its next sweep. The invisible clock hand moved round it, casting shadows as it rearranged words and symbols and figures, but it was still meaningless.
To one side of the big screen was the old-fashioned floor-standing microphone—five feet tall with a weighted circular base—which Swann had swept to one side after his last troubling conversation with the Department. The weighted circular base had kept it from falling over.
It started to buzz, and its monitor light flashed Attention Now.
“Clerical Officer Oban, Office of Miscellaneous Vehicles, Department of Administrative Affairs. The Department is extremely sorry to trouble you, Director; this is a routine procedural matter only. If it’s not convenient…..”
“Yes, yes, I know you’re real, cut the foreplay.”
“There’s been a development.”
“I can see that. What does it mean?”
“Foord has had a success. A major success.”
•
Whatever else they were, the inhabitants of Faith were sentient. They were not in immediate danger from the chaos Foord had brought them—they had never had, or needed, the capacity to feel personal danger—but neither could they ignore it. They reflected.
Nothing else in the universe was quite like them. They were invincible, but not immortal. They had always known what they were made for. For other sentient beings this might have been revealed by one unusual individual, who might have written a Book which would change their lives, but not for them: they had always known. It was part of the balance of the universe, part of its clockwork, that they were invincible. If they weren’t, the universe was wrong.
•
“Foord has had a success. A major success.”
“Good! How major?”
“He’s damaged Her again, more seriously than the first time…We think the balance has started to shift. We think he’s winning.”
“There’s something in your voice. What’s wrong?”
The microphone stayed silent. As Swann watched it, it seemed—without moving—to acquire its own body language, reflecting the uncertainty he heard in its silence.
Behind the microphone, the big screen completed another update sweep. The invisible clockhand again moved over the words and figures and diagrams, and Swann’s staff milled around it. They shouted things at him, but the silence from the microphone drowned them out.
When the voice next spoke, it seemed different, and Swann was bewildered when he realised why. The voice actually sounded embarrassed.
“You see, there’s been a development.”
“I know. You told me. Foord’s winning.”
“No; it’s us. We’re not unanimous any more.”
“About what?” Make it be about something physical, or something operational, Swann prayed silently to the microphone. Not something unreadable.
“Some of us think we might not have fully appreciated something.”
And Swann knew then that something was wrong. That something enormous was enormously wrong. If the voice had been merely frightened, he could have been frightened with it; that was normal when you encountered operational setbacks, and you could be frightened and still have a chance of putting them right. But the voice was embarrassed. You only sounded embarrassed when there was something you couldn’t put right.
“And what is it,” he asked carefully, “that you Might Not have Fully Appreciated?”
“Foord. We know what might happen if he loses. But if he wins, it might be worse.”
“What?”
“If he loses, it might threaten the Commonwealth. But if he wins, it might threaten more than the Commonwealth.”
“What can be more than the Commonwealth?”
“Everything.”
•
It was part of the balance of the universe, part of its clockwork, that they were invincible. They did the work of gods, without being gods themselves. No single one of them was significantly more intelligent than Foord, or Smithson, or Thahl, or Cyr. But they were made differently. Nothing else in the universe had ever been made like them.