Thirty-two days after Alfred Omega
Carl has no idea who he is. He thinks he's a man. I've tried to tell him: There are no men, and there are no women. There are only fields of force.
Our bodies are starships. The Archon has spent four billion years building them. The equipment is all there, inside us, as our neurology, but the demons keep the Lord from using us. Ile demon psychoids of the unconscious have possessed all ten billion of the, humans that have ever lived. Only a few of us have sensed the Archon. And of them, only a handful have consciously learned how to activate that power in our own bodies.
Thirty-six days after Alfred Omega
Aeschylus expressed -it well when he had Prometheus say:
I caused men to no longer foresee their death. I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.
Carl has stolen fire from the Archon. The lance makes him a god among us. Yet he remains enraptured by his momories of Eves. Perhaps I should be thankful the archon of
- love has claimed him rather than the archon of power. I'm sure that's the doing of the urg. It wants Carl back. The inertial displacement between them must be immense, and every' cell in Carl's body must be craving to return to the Werld. No wonder dominance of this faraway planet seems puny.
But I have no inertial homecalling to dampen my imagination or quell my will to power. Carl has seen me looking at the lance in reverie. It is not the power itself I crave:
The power is a shadow of the metaconscious.
The lance is merely a symbol of what I want.
"A balmy wind spills off the Hudson," Zeke wrote, watching a breeze unpleat the drapes of his window and fill the bedroom with the smell of the river. "I've nightmared Nam again. Like everything of this temporary earth that tries for something greater, my mind strains to understand why I am living in two different worlds, one of peace and one of pain. The answer I sense through my inspelling is almost unbearable: Contrastive thinking is an elaborate hallucination.
Worse, it is the viper I have mistaken for a rope."
Zeke turned off the light, and in the shuttered darkness, a hypnagogic spun before him. It was a retinal mandala, a rosemaling of torn limbs and glutinous napalm-melted flesh, all blurring together in the surfglow of his closed eyes. Before shutting his journal, he wrote in it by feeclass="underline" "The hand is not different from what it writes down."
Galgul was a cloud of rubble. Two black spheres and three cracked egg shapes were the only traces of order in an amorphous sprawl of floating debris. Blasttwisted shards of metal and coils of black dust looped with the fallpaths.
Anything organic had been seared to ash by the firestorm that had gulfed the exploded, structures. Inert, jagged forms hovered like a black aura around the ruins of Galgul.
Five of the twelve clustered city-spheres had been destroyed. Their three-kilometer-wide plasteel shells had been shattered into junk by a gravity wave that had bounded out of a lynk in one of the spheres. The lynk had connected with a four-space, positively curved stellar zone one hundred and thirty billion light-years
away. Three zotl needlecraft had established the lynk after following a Foke-shaped gravity echo into the Rim. The conclusion was obvious. A Rimstalker had armored a Foke, had sent him to a Foke-fertile planet where the food lure to the zotl would be irresistible, and had used the lure to attack the zotl through their own lynk. The plan had been a cunning and devastatingly effective one.
Like two spider gods, the remaining city-spheres of Galgul hung in a web of broken metal, misty against the whorl of the Cloudriver. The broken hulks of the ruined spheres dangled like torn roots among clots of fused metal. Needlecraft sparkled among the rocksmoke and the avalanches of destroyed shapes.
Camouflaged by the tumult of devastation were jumpships, black boomerangs with laser cannon, waiting in ambush for any Foke or Rimstalker aggression.
Zotl and Rimstalkers had warred since the zotl first arrived in the Werld, seventy-two cycles ago. Though the two species occupied the two distant poles, a Werld apart, they were both four-space creatures, and they conflicted in the tesseract range that contained the Werld. Their battles were timeflux distortions in superspace, and they fought over which species would occupy the narrow tetrad vector field that connected the Werld with the multiverse.
The Rimstalkers had dominated this gateway to infinity for the three hundred cycles of their time in the Werld before the zotl arrived. Rimstalker technology was by far the most advanced, but zotl four-space awareness was innately more adroit. After forty cycles of zotl incursions into the disputed tetrad vector. field, the spider people established a beachhead and, by dint of their elusive four-space awareness, were able to evade Rimstalker timeflux distortions and develop a lynk technology of their own. In another two or three
cycles, .they would have begun establishing a multiversal empire.
The zotl had been taken by surprise when the Rimstalkers abandoned their superspace forays to attack Galgul with a three-space gravity wave. Within moments, the zotl capital had been reduced to ruins. Only two city-spheres were left intact. Three were crippled, and the rest utterly demolished. And now, Foke-zotl food-were using the rubble-clogged fallpaths to penetrate zotl defenses and sabotage the cleanup and repair work.
This was the darkest time the zotl had known in the Werld, and their keening warbled across the tesseract range to Rataros, where the Rimstalkers were equally shocked. They had issued the, armor to Carl Schirmer as a favor to an eld skyle that had opened a channel to the tetrad vector 'field when the Rimstalkers were in need. Unlike the zotl, the Rimstalkers did not rely on organic sustenance. Their nourishment came directly from the hyperphotons of the tetrad vector field, and when the zotl began to expropriate vast swaths of the tetrad field for their own expansionist strategies, Rimstalkers starved.
Eld skyles, as five-space beings, were in a position to direct the four-space vector field to some degree.
One eld skyle had been able to channel enough hyperphotons to save the lives of over a thousand Rimstalkers.
In return, the Rimstalkers had armored Carl and sent him to fetch the three-space substance that the eld skyle needed for its own survival. ''
. The Rimstalkers had never guessed that the zotl would detect the fraction-of-a-second echo in the tetrad field, let alone follow it to its destination. That the armor had demonstrated the wit and initiative to wait for, the zotl to set up a lynk and then use the zotl lynk to assault Calgul was not as surprising. The armor, after all, had its own artificial intelligence loyal to its creators, and it was only slightly hampered by the emotional organ the creature it occupied called a brain.
But now the Rimstalkers had a problem.
If the Rimstalkers had planned this offensive, they would have used a light lance with the power to destroy all of Galgul.
Instead, the zotl had been badly hurt but not eliminated. The Foke harassing them could not hope to overcome them. So, in a cycle or two, the zotl would be back in the tetrad vector field and more aggressive than ever.
Some of the Rimstalkers wanted to armor more Foke and direct an assault against the remnants of Galgul. But that idea was dismissed at once in the face of the realization that the zotl, if pressed to the wall, could use their budding lynk technology to disrupt the gravity matrix that gave the Werld its shape and collapse the entire Werld into, the black hole that held them all.
The Rimstalkers understood: A three-space war against the zotl was. out of the question. They had to capitulate.
In return for a zbtl agreement to stay out of the tetrad vector field for five cycles and then only to occupy regions designated by the Rimstalkers, the Rimstalkers acknowledged that the gravity wave that had blasted Galgul was an accident, not the prelude to a three-space war. As a token of retribution, the Rimstalkers gave the zotl a light lance and armor of their own.