Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [17]
Tekton also discovered that his panic had been in part validated. His mind was irrevocably changed. Two distinct voices filled his head where a conglomerate consciousness had existed before.
The livery helped him out of the container and handed him liquid refreshment. He sipped the juice, listening closely to the two streams of thought. One, he realised after a time, spoke a torrent of unassailable reason while the other was a bubbling cauldron of creative emotion.
Tekton became exultant.
Where humanesque neurophysiology had previously doomed him to for ever be the victim of both, acting in concert as they had, now he was able to separate the two entirely. One was no longer inextricably linked with the other. He could choose which voice to follow. He felt social customs and personal desires tease apart from pure knowledge and roll into individual slots. He felt clarity and a sense of infinite possibility blossom.
The Balol interrupted his revelling introspection.
‘You have been accepted to commune by the Sole Entity. It will now communicate directly with you. Because the Entity is invisible, the amphitheatre will decode and provide some imagined definition for you.’ She added under her ruffle, almost to herself, ‘We find this helps.’
Space fell at Tekton. Where in one breath he had been staring out into distance, in the next he was out in that cold distance. His free mind primal-screamed about vacuum and weightlessness, while his new logic-mind calmly deduced that either his senses had been tampered with or the Entity was somehow protecting him—he was alive and breathing, after all. In his first act of duality he shut his free mind off, and floated.
Sole appeared around him as rippling dark distortion, a glutinous shimmer beyond Tekton’s understanding. He hung in Sole’s space (or thoughtspace?) like an insect stuck in glue and pondered what wonders Ra would see with full-spectrum sight.
A trickle of acuity began to flow into his pristine logic-mind. It became a gurgle and then a gush—a torrent of connections forged, soaking into his brain as if it were a blotter. But the sensation ceased abruptly as the blotter soon grew saturated. Sensations gave way to an implicit message not spoken but absorbed.
Show/beauty.
* * * *
Tekton reflected on his brief communion with the Entity for the next few days. Beauty was what the Entity sought. How did one show a god beauty?
His tyro stipulated no time constraints or deadlines, only that he comply with the observers and (this being the important subtext) bring acclaim to Lostol.
Tekton therefore divided his time between voicing design ideas for something beautiful into his moud-caddy, and inspecting the scope of the pseudo-world.
The tyros’ sector was a small sliver given over to Sole’s students—Circle Five, to be exact—and the rest belonged to a semi-ordered combination of OLOSS scientists and their support staff, a joint humanesque and organic-AI team.
In the larger part of the pseudo-world the physicists and astronemeins worked on a feverish, non-stop observation of Sole.
While the moud answered Tekton’s most pragmatic questions, he was compelled to take his deeper questions back to the ménage lounge and meet the other humanesques. He also needed company. Tando Studium, his alma mater, was a busy social place to work and Belle-Monde felt oddly lonely.
As Tekton taxied over to the lounge for the first time since meeting Ra, he asked the moud to tell him about his colleagues. Dieter Miranda Seeward, it said, was the director of the Advanced Surgical Facility on the planet Ikar.
Labile Conit—who would not disclose his place of origin—had studied at the famous Yeungnam Studium school of Geneering.
Javid Jivviddat was celebrated for having found a cure for the uuli repeater virus. (Personally, Tekton thought it not such a great accomplishment—what would OLOSS miss about uulis? The