“Bloody future-sworn!” I almost spat on the floor but Grandmother’s presence still haunted the throne room too strongly for that. Luntar saw a future that might be better than those that had burned him but if he steered us toward it, it would start to retreat, and if he answered our questions the whole possibility might evaporate like a morning mist. Even giving us the box would have blinded him to our paths now, making his vision less clear. Do nothing and see everything that will be with perfect and impotent clarity—or reach out to change things and like a hand touching water destroy the reflection of tomorrow. The frustration of it would drive me mad.
“Open the box?” Garyus placed the box in question on the small table I’d carried over. I placed a lantern beside it: afternoon had shaded toward evening and the shadows multiplied in every corner. “Open the box . . .” He tapped his fingers on the polished surface.
“That’s been known to go wrong in the past,” I said.
Garyus raised an eyebrow at that. “Pandora?”
“All the ills of the world.” I nodded. “Besides, he said it’s full of ghosts. That’s the case made for burying it right there.”
“He also said we should ask them our questions.”
I looked at the box and found my curiosity had dried right up.
“Are you scared, Jalan?” Garyus looked up at me, the light and shadow conspiring to make a monster of him. His deformity had that character— innocent one moment, pitiable even, the next sinister, malign. At those times I had no doubt he was twin to the Silent Sister.
“Scared doesn’t cover it.” The plasteek looked more like bone in the lantern light. Visions of Hell bubbled at the back of my mind and I wondered just how much of that place the art of the Builders might fit into one small box. “Petrified.”
“Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?” And Garyus opened the box.
“Empty!” A laugh burst from me, somehow small and hollow in the loneliness of the hall.
“It does seem to—” Garyus drew his hand back with an oath. One red fingerprint remained where he had touched the lid.
“Blood?” I asked, tilting my head to study the mark.
Garyus nodded, one finger in his mouth. “The thing bit me!”
As we watched, the crimson print faded, the blood drawn into the substance of the plasteek, leaving no stain. Something flickered in the air above the open box. A figure, there then gone, misty, as if formed and lost in a cold breath. Another came, flickering into being, a man’s shape, maybe eighteen inches high, gone.
“Kendeth.” The word came from the box, an ageless voice, calm and clean.
A host of figures now, men, women, young, old, each twisting into the next.
“Stop . . .” Garyus raised a hand toward the box and as he did so the flickering motion ceased, just one figure there now, a pale ghost, the lines of the table visible through his body.
“James Alan Kendeth,” the ghost said, not looking at either one of us but rather at some distant point between.
“You’re the ghost of my ancestor?” Garyus asked.
The ghost frowned, flickered, and replied. “I am a library entry for the data echo of James Alan Kendeth. I can answer questions. To access the full simulation requires access to a net-terminal.”
“What’s it saying?” I asked. Some of the words made sense, the rest might as well be another language.
Garyus shushed me. “Are you a ghost?”
The ghost frowned then smiled. “No. I’m a copy of James Alan Kendeth. A representation of him based on detailed observations.”
“And James himself?”
“He died more than a thousand years ago.”
“How did he die?”
“A thermonuclear device detonated above the city in which he lived.” A moment of sorrow on the ghost’s pale face.
“A what?”
“An explosion.”
“A Builders’ Sun?”
“A fusion device . . . so like the sun, yes.”
“Why did the Builders destroy themselves?” Garyus stared at the little ghost, floating above its empty box, his great brow mounded above the intensity of his eyes.
The ghost flickered and for a split second I saw its skin bubble as if remembering the heat. “No reason that matters. An escalation of rhetoric. One domino falling against the next and in a few hours everything was ashes.”
“Why would they do it again, now?” Garyus asked. “Why destroy us?”
“To survive.” Our distant ancestor looked from Garyus to me and back to Garyus as if noticing us as people for the first time, not just voices with questions. “The continued use of will is unbalancing . . .” He paused, his gaze now on some distant thing in some other place. “. . . the Rechenberg equation—that’s what they call it—it governs the change, what you people call the ‘magic’. We called it magic too, to be honest. Maybe one person in ten thousand understood it. The rest of us just knew that the scientists had changed how the world worked and bang, magic became possible, superpowers! It wasn’t like it is today though—it was harder to use—we had training and—”
“Our magics are unbalancing your equation.” Garyus cut across him. “Why kill us?”
“If everyone dies there’ll be no more magic used. The equation may balance itself. The change may stop. The world might survive and the data-echoes held in the deepnet would be preserved.”
“You’d sacrifice us for echoes? But . . . you’re not real. You’re not alive,” I said. “You’re memories in machines?”
“I feel real.” The ghost-James set ghost-hands to his transparent chest. “I feel alive. I wish to continue. In any event, if we don’t destroy you then you’ll only destroy yourselves and us with you.”
He had a point there but I had little sympathy for any point that might impale me. “So why are we still here? Why only two explosions?”
“There is disagreement. There isn’t a majority in favour of the nuclear solution. Yet. Gelleth was an accident. Hamada was a test that went wrong.”
“Why are you telling us all this?” I wouldn’t have been so forthcoming in his position.
“I’m a library entry. Answering is my purpose.”
“But somewhere . . . in the machines . . . is a full copy of James Alan Kendeth? One with opinions and desires?”
The ghost nodded. “Even so.”
“Can the Wheel be turned back?” Garyus asked with sudden urgency.
A pause. “You’re referring to IKOL facility at Leipzig?” James sounded as if he were reading from a book.
“The Wheel of Osheim.”
James Alan Kendeth nodded. Another pause. “It’s a particle accelerator, a circular tunnel over two hundred miles long. The idea of a steeringwheel for the universe is a simplified way of understanding the change that the IKOL facility effected and continues to drive. The engines at IKOL turn a hypothetical wheel, a dial if you like, changing the default settings for reality. The machinery in the collision chamber would dwarf your cathedrals. In short it is a machine, not a wheel that can be turned.”
“It’s a machine!” I seized on the idea. “You’re a machine. You turn it off!”
“The system is isolated to prevent interference. To approach it physically would be . . . difficult. The Rechenberg field fluctuates wildly as one approaches.”
“Oh well.” I reached for the box, eager to shut it. Every bad story that ever began starts with Osheim, and I knew just how bad things grew as you approached it. I would put my faith in Grandmother to save us. “Nothing can be done then.” My hand grew cold before my fingers even reached the box, as if I’d plunged it into cold water.
“Entanglement detected.” The original voice of the box, neither male, nor female, nor human. Our ancestor’s ghost flickered out of being to be replaced by an elderly narrow-faced man. He stood before us for a moment then faded into a younger woman with short hair and eyes ringed with dark circles, no beauty but striking. The man returned, then the woman. Both seemed familiar somehow.
“Stop,” I said, and the woman stayed.
“Asha Lauglin,” the ageless voice spoke and fell silent. The woman looked up and met my eyes.
“H . . . how did you die?” I withdrew my hand. Something in her gaze scared me.
“I didn’t die,” she said.
“You’re just an echo, a story in a machine, we know that. How did the real Asha die?”
“She didn’t die.” Asha glanced at Garyus then returned her gaze to me.
“What happened to her on the Day of a Thousand Suns?”
“She transmuted by force of will. Her identity became mapped into negative energy states in the dark energy of the universe.”
“What?”
“She became incorporeal.”
“What?”
“A spirit.”