Heretics (8 page)

He heard and felt a metallic click at the base of his skull.

It began to dawn on him:
Hall of Minds.

Then something cold and alien sunk its fingers into his brain.

“It is the height of arrogance to assume you are unique.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.”

—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

Mallory's skull ached, a throbbing pressure that originated at the base of his skull and radiated inward, twisting threads of pain through his brain. At some point during the procedure he had blacked out.

Before he was fully awake, he reached up. Someone with soft hands took his wrist and whispered, “Don't do that.”

He blinked and a blurry image of a woman's face slowly came into focus. “Dr. Dörner?” he whispered, his mouth slurring the words.

“It's over,” she whispered. “I think they're done with us.”

Her blue eyes were edged with red and didn't appear nearly as icy as he was used to. His first thought was,
They're no longer separating us?

He tried to sit up, but his balance was off, and moving his head caused a wave of vertigo. Dörner placed her hand on his shoulder and said, “Don't move too quickly; you're still adjusting to the implant.”

“Implant,” he said, slurring the words.

He looked up at Dörner and saw a bandage peeking out from the back of her neck. He reached up again, and she tried to stop him again. He pulled his wrist out of her grip and touched a similar dressing covering the back of his own neck.

When he touched it, he grunted as the throbbing became a spike driving through his skull. He gasped and tensed every muscle in his body while the flash of agony faded.

She grabbed his shoulder, “Are you all right?”

After a moment to catch his breath, he said, “I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't do that.” Laboriously, he pushed himself up into a sitting position, trying to overcome the vertigo by force of will.

The room was larger than the one where they had been holding him. Big enough to hold half a dozen cots. Dr. Brody, the cultural anthropologist from the
Eclipse
, a man as dark as Dörner was pale, sat at the end of one of the cots, watching Mallory and Dörner, his right arm in a cast.

Mallory was thankful to see him alive. Brody had been injured when the lifeboat landed, and the last time Mallory had seen him conscious was before the
Eclipse
had tached into this system.

Even so, Brody didn't look that well. His large frame seemed to have folded in on itself, and his dark skin had taken on a sickly yellow cast. Like Dörner, the back of his head was bandaged. It was more obvious on him because he didn't have the hair to cover it. Mallory frowned, realizing that it was little better than a field dressing, and he could see blood crusted around the edges of the hidden wound.

“Father Mallory,” he said, “you look like hell.”

“Where's Dr. Pak?” Mallory asked.

“I presume he's making his own visit to the Hall of Minds right now,” Brody told him. “Judging by the time between your arrival and Dr. Dörner's, it seems to take them about three hours.”

Mallory looked from Dörner to Brody and back again. “Do you know what they're doing?”

“Interrogating us,” Brody said with a weak smile. “Probably more thoroughly than we were expecting.”

“Don't make light of this!” Dörner snapped at him.

Brody's fragile smile shattered. “What else have I got?” he spoke through gritted teeth.

“At least you weren't conscious through it. At least you didn't feel them—feel it—” Her voice choked off, and she turned away from both of them.

Brody whispered, “I don't think it makes it better.” Mallory rubbed his palms on his legs, trying to regain his equilibrium. “Is it what I think it is?” Mallory asked. “They implanted a bio- interface, and they hooked us all up to a computer—”

“
The
computer,” Brody said. “I have Sharon's description of where they took us. Unquestionably a ritual space devoted to exactly what they did to us, although I suspect their own people undergo a less abbreviated initiation.”

“It's not an initiation,” Dörner said. “It's rape.”

“I doubt it is truly consensual, even among their own people. Once a culture devotes this much energy to something, opting out is rarely an option.”

“What are they devoting energy to?” Mallory asked.

“The preservation of their ancestors, at its base. Their entire history downloaded and stored like so many files in a library. Though I wonder how they access that wealth of information.”

Mallory looked at him and felt a deep unease.

“I'm not a computer specialist,” Brody went on, “but from my history I know that even at the height of the heretical technologies, no one ever was able to extract coherent information from a static recording of someone's mind—human or AI. There always needed to be some sort of brain hosting it.”

Mallory didn't know what was more disturbing, having his mind implanted in some heretical AI, or having it implanted in someone else.

Dörner was right, they
had
been raped. They had been violated more thoroughly than any physical assault could have done. Their captors had stripped them down to the very soul, stealing things that were to be between only God and themselves. The entirety of their existence.

When a pair of guards brought Dr. Leon Pak into the room, glassy-eyed and unresponsive, Mallory felt as far from God's grace as he ever had in his life.

 

Alexander Shane watched as they carried the last of the offworlders from the antechamber. He had been the youngest, and the physical part of linking to the Hall of Minds was easiest for him. The mental part, though, was the worst. He had seen it in the displays monitoring the connection; he had resisted retrieval to an unprecedented degree.

His men left him alone in the antechamber. None had questioned what he was doing. He doubted any of these men would. He had handpicked them, and each had at least two ornate glyphs upon their brows that matched with one of the fifteen on Shane's naked scalp. At least two ancestors downloaded in common, either in this room, or in another room like it somewhere on Salmagundi.

Therefore, most understood his thought processes, even if they didn't completely share them. They would have been right to question him, but none did. And all of the ones who might have questioned him probably knew that leaving him alone, unchallenged, made his decisions that much harder.

It was a questionable decision in a long line of questionable decisions. He had chosen to stage a coup and take the Triad's authority as his own, in part because he believed they were all in desperate danger. In part because he wanted no one else to face the responsibility for some of the things he had to do.

Things like taking copies of unwilling, living people, and feeding them to the Hall of Minds. For over a century, the Hall had been a repository only for the dead and dying, a means to preserve their knowledge and their contributions to Salmagundi. Only a few dozen minds here had been taken while their bodies lived on, all original Founders.

Those minds were rarely taken on by their descendants, more from practical concerns than from any taboo. Better to take in some elder who had taken on a lifetime of history and knowledge from others, someone like Shane himself who hosted the merged personas of fourteen people who had likewise merged themselves with many of their ancestors.

The fifteenth was an exception. To serve in the Triad, a potential leader was expected to take on the additional persona of one of the Founders. It was recognized that at such a venerable time in someone's life, matters of practicality were of less a concern. It created a layer of history in the mind, a perspective that was necessary to lead.

It also inevitably influenced the personality of the host. Shane wondered how many of his decisions of the past few days were prompted by the presence of his distant namesake in his skull. He remembered the history of Kathy Shane, ex-captain with the Occisis Marines, better than any of the other lives that had contributed to make up what he was. She had sacrificed herself to shield the people she had charge of—not her life, but her command, her honor, everything of value to her.

Like his distant ancestor, Shane was in a position where he had to do things that would—in the end—disqualify him from leading the people he was trying to save. Already he had engaged in a coup, and now he was about to do something that verged on blasphemy.

If Salmagundi survived, Shane knew that he would not be granted the solace of contributing to the Hall of Minds. He would be tried, convicted, and executed, and his mind would be allowed to disappear with his body.

He eased onto one of the tables and laid himself facedown, the bio-interface in the back of his neck pointing upward toward the medical robot.

He closed his eyes. In some sense he was giving up everything with this act. Not just his position in Salmagundi society, but he was abandoning his self as well. However, there were warships closing on his planet, and he didn't have time to extract information from the prisoners in any other way. In less than an hour, he would know their stories front to back, without opportunity of deception.

He only hoped that somewhere, in their collective mind, there might be some hope of a solution.

He gritted his teeth, grabbed the edges of the table, and said, “Connect.”

Above him the robot whirred, and a cable clicked into the back of his neck. A half second later, the Hall of Minds released a torrent into Shane's brain. A barrage of memory and personality, a parade of selves no longer self-aware, no longer conscious of unraveling into the memory of the Hall of Minds. The four identities erupted through the core of Shane's mind like magma erupting through the cracks in a volcanic island, searing what was there, burying it, enlarging it, and irrevocably changing the landscape.

Dr. Pak sat on the edge of the cots staring into the middle distance. He clenched his hands into fists on top of his thighs and silently rocked back and forth. Mallory watched Dörner try to talk to him, but he remained largely unresponsive. The only signs he wasn't completely catatonic were when he yanked his arm away from her touch, and his answer when she asked if they could do anything for him.

His response was a flat, affectless, “No.”

Brody sat next to him, and the slow, deliberate nature of his movements showed that Brody was having the toughest recovery from the physical effects of the bio-interface implant. “Do you have any idea what we can do for him?”

I should
, Mallory thought. He had been trained in counseling when he had chosen his vocation. A priest was supposed to provide comfort and solace. However, that had never been his strong suit. He suspected that, even though he wasn't the one to sabotage the
Eclipse
, the fact he had joined Mosasa's expedition with a falsified identity meant he was not trusted here. Even if Dörner and Brody might accept him for the moment because of their shared trials, the lie stood between Mallory and the survivors of the
Eclipse
.

Mallory couldn't ask Pak to trust him enough to allow him to help. It would be hard enough for a Jesuit university professor to provide the counseling he needed after being psychically brutalized. Given Mallory's recent history, he had the uneasy feeling that any help from him would only intensify the trauma.

He looked at Brody and said, “Dr. Dörner is doing the only thing we can do.” He watched her talking quietly to the damaged linguist, and he saw in her face a softness that hadn't been there while they were on the
Eclipse
. Of the three here, she was probably the best choice to comfort him.

“Why did you do it?” Brody asked.