Prophets

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Relic

Nothing moves a State quicker than fear, and nothing a

State fears so much as change.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

What governs men is the fear of truth.

—Henri FrÉDÉric Amiel (1821-1881)

Date: 2526.5.29 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

In the month since the egg landed, a small village of temporary buildings had sprung up around the egg. Most of the buildings had been moved from one of Robert Sheldon’s mobile logging camps.

It wasn’t long after Frank and Tony landed and took Flynn into custody before the first of the portable outbuildings arrived. They shoved him into one of the barracks buildings shortly after it landed. The building was little more than a large modular container that could mate with the bottom of a large cargo aircraft. The skin was heavy and well-insulated enough to survive a wildfire in the dry season. The people inside would survive, too, if they didn’t run out of air.

The structure could house twenty or thirty people. But it also made a fairly good impromptu prison. Even without cuffs or a restraint collar, Flynn would have had an impossible time trying to get out of it without someone opening the armored, fireproof doors for him.

Fortunately, they removed the cuffs within the first forty-eight hours, and provided relatively decent food and clean clothing. But they wouldn’t remove the restraint collar, and the comm units were completely isolated inside the new camp’s network. He could call security, and that was about it.

At least it had something of an entertainment library, since it was designed to support a working camp, though about half was porn and 90 percent of the rest was thinly disguised work-safety tutorials. Flynn and Tetsami spent most of their time playing chess against each other, and replaying variants of the same conversation.

“I don’t believe that thing is here.” Tetsami rubbed her neck, mirroring the placement of the restraint collar. “I don’t even remember how far we are from Bakunin here—”

“One hundred and fourteen light-years,” Flynn said. “You’ve told me often enough.” He moved a rook on the small comm screen.

“Those things don’t have tach-drives. It’s been traveling for a couple of centuries at least.”

Flynn shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that such an advanced society would settle for sub-light speeds. Your move.”

“The Proteans were a little weird,” Tetsami agreed, castling. “Very much kept to themselves. But I think the word ‘seed’ covers what they’re doing, propagating themselves.”

“That slow?”

“Think of the energy a tach-drive requires for each jump. That thing is what, three meters long? They get it to speed and coast and it requires the same energy to get here as it does to get to the next galaxy. All it takes is time.”

“A lot of time.”

Tetsami shrugged. “I can see a little of their perspective. I mean, back when I first heard of them, I never expected to be in lockup with my great-to-the-seventh-power grandson one hundred and seventy-five years later, waiting for him to move something.”

“Yeah.” Flynn moved a knight behind his rook and smiled. “Check.”

“Christ on a unicycle,” she muttered at the screen.

“One hundred and seventy-five is one thing, millions is another—”

“Millions of what?” Robert Sheldon asked from the doorway to the barracks.

Flynn blinked Tetsami’s image away and looked at his boss. The man had sandy hair gone half gray. He had four glyphs on his forehead, and like most of the people with four or more, he had a somewhat flat voice and an expression that Flynn thought of as mechanical.

“Years,” Flynn said without any explanatory comment. “Are you going to explain why Ashley security has locked me up for nearly a month?”

Sheldon walked up, shaking his head. “You’re an impulsive young man.” He sat down on the bunk opposite him and next to the comm still showing the game in progress, almost precisely where Tetsami had been sitting. “And naive as well, even for knowing one of the Founders.”

Flynn squirmed a little inside at Sheldon’s language. He never liked the way people used the word “knowing” someone to refer to what Flynn had come to see as ritualized psychic cannibalism. Having Tetsami with him as a separate person made the way it was supposed to happen, the merging of personalities, seem so wrong. Who the hell was anyone to deny her her own identity, or that of any of the millions of people archived in the Hall of Minds? Everyone looked at Flynn the singleton as having no respect for the ancestors of Salmagundi, but was it more respectful to see their ancestors as little more than an undifferentiated data source? No more individuals than they were themselves?

Flynn did something he usually avoided in conversation; he looked Sheldon in the eye. “Why did you have me locked up here?”

God, his eyes look dead.

Please, Gram, let me talk to him.

“Mr. Jorgenson, you did not have authorization—”

“That’s bullshit.” Flynn stood up, and the move was fast enough for the restraint collar in his neck to send a warning pulse that fired a nasty wave of numbness down his legs and arms. “There was an impact in my survey zone, and it turns out that I had some particular knowledge—”

“Any investigation needed to be cleared before—”

“So I broke a regulation; you don’t imprison someone for that. Sure, fire me. But what the fuck is this?”

Sheldon reached up and clasped Flynn’s hands, lowering them. Sheldon’s hands were cold and hard, like being touched by a headstone.

“Lower your voice, son. I am here as a favor to your father.”

“My father’s dead.”

“Sit.”

“Are you going to explain—”

“Sit!” Sheldon’s voice changed, making Flynn realize that, up to this point, Sheldon’s voice had still retained a trace of human warmth and character to it; characteristics that evaporated in the single command.

Flynn sat.

“Mr. Jorgenson,” Flynn noticed this time that Sheldon seemed uncomfortable using the address.“Do you realize what would happen to you if I did not intervene on your behalf?”

“My behalf?”

“Quiet!”

Flynn shut up.

“You may know one of the Founders, but you seem to have forgotten why they came here.”

No, Bobby, Flynn remembers just fine. It’s you assholes who decided to misinterpret and take things out of context—

Gram, not now.

Sorry.

“Contact with the decadent cultures beyond this planet is a grave assault on our purpose here. A violation of the commandments of our Founders.”

“But—”

“Please listen.” Sheldon placed his hand on Flynn’s shoulder and almost sounded human. “The thing that makes us what we are, our communion with the past, that would be the first thing they take away from us.”

Inside Flynn’s head, a quiet voice whispered to itself, Christ on a crutch, I’m going to be sick.

“I told you what this is. You know it isn’t some Confederacy artifact.”

Sheldon shook his head. “You are young and haven’t known enough of our history to understand. We cannot allow this kind of disruption to our way of life. It matters little where this thing is from.”

“Disruption?” Flynn shook his head. “This thing is from a culture that’s so far beyond the Confederacy the Founders escaped that it’s nearly inconceivable. Just understanding the smallest bit of it could—”

“It could destroy everything we’ve built here.”

“What?”

“This arrival is too dangerous to be made public knowledge. By association, the Triad has decided that you are too dangerous as well. I intervened, out of respect for your father, to spare your life.”

Flynn opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

“You see the gravity of this now? The Triad was prepared to erase you, completely, without archival—”

Flynn could care less about the Hall of Minds. But the thought that the Triad considered killing him—the current, flesh-and-blood person—just to avoid some sort of “disruption,” that was worse than appalling. But, thanks to his boss, Flynn had stayed alive, under house arrest in the barracks by the fallen seed.

“Why are you here?” Flynn asked.

“I wanted you to know that this will be over soon.” He looked into Flynn’s face. “When things return to normal, I want your promise not to make any waves. Don’t make me regret helping you.”

“I—”

“Please, Flynn. Your father was my friend.”

Do you even have friends? Flynn thought.

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

Sheldon let go of Flynn’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.” As he got up to leave he glanced at the comm screen and said, “White has mate in three moves.”

Flynn heard Tetsami whisper inside his skull, What are they going to do?