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Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. “As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!” He took a deep drink, wiped his mouth, and laughed again.
Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite.
I lie awake each night in my cheap room with the window open to the pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile city’s heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing. Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man.
I nodded, understanding nothing.
We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am sure, that the other was a total idiot.
“A man of infinite jest. Not one of them funny. A real horse’s ass, Horatio.”
“The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,” whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, “it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web—way beyond the sum of its parts ’cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts—and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it.”
MY EARLY POETRY was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama.
“What do you think?” I asked Tyrena as she read through the first copy. Her eyes were blank, bronze disks in that week’s fashion, but this did not hide the fact that there were tears there. She brushed one away. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I tried to rediscover the voice of some of the Ancients,” I said, suddenly shy. “You succeeded brilliantly.” “The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,” I said. “It’s perfect.” “It’s about loneliness,” I said. “It is loneliness.” “Do you think it’s ready?” I asked. “It’s perfect…a masterpiece.” “Do you think it’ll sell?” I asked. “No fucking way.”
“You said seventy million were planned,” I said. “Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.” I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?” “The AI loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.”
“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”
After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.
The three men on the long bench looked at one another. Avner said, “They’ve found a cure?” “No,” said Sol, “but I’ve found a reason to hope.” “Hope is good,” Robert said in cautious tones. Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard. “It had better be,” he said. “Sometimes it is all we’re given.”
“Yes. The violence was…barbaric.” “ ‘Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine,’ ”
“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”
Siri’s hands helped me. Her short hair pressed back against bleached wood, white cotton, and sand. My pulse outraced the surf. “Do you understand, Merin?” she whispered to me seconds later as her warmth connected us. “Yes,” I whispered back. But I did not.
The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man—all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fratricide—the murder of any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor. And the Ousters, the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between the stars and the only group not dominated by the TechnoCore, was next on our list of extinction.
