The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [172]
Robert tilted his head left and right and saw enough to figure out that he was lying on a light blue couch with rough grey walls on either side. He swallowed more fluid.
‘How bad is it?’
‘Your spine is broken in three places, both legs have compound fractures and your left shoulder was also broken. In order to carry out repairs I used a neural cutout and interfaced your conscious mind with the outer margins of the Godhead’s thoughtflow. Your instincts for exploration, however, guided you straight towards the theatre of his desires and motivations.’
‘That informal hearing,’ Robert said. ‘It didn’t end on a … positive note.’ And neither did my arrival.
‘You certainly did well to resist his flattery and bribes, and to see through him. It gave me time to stabilise your condition and move you here.’
‘I’ve met enough narcissistic thugs to know one when I see one,’ Robert said. ‘But all that doesn’t tell me much about who and what you are. And would you please raise my head so that I can see!’
‘Of course.’
A motor hummed beneath the couch and his head inched up, permitting a better view of the room. It looked like a box made of unsurfaced plascrete, walls, floor and a ceiling that were compacted grey extrude flattened and left unfaced. There were two long shuttered windows in the wall in front of him while several medical machines flanked him, monitoring, beeping faintly as they delivered nutrients and medication. The devices were all worn and scratched, not unlike a dark green and brown machine that hovered to his left, the direction where the voice had come from. It had the shape of a small disc sitting atop a larger one. From an open slot in the lower disc glassy sensors regarded him.
‘Greetings to you, Robert Horst. I am speaking to you via this remote because I am the Godhead’s eternal companion, of which he will never be free. I am his conscience, his empathy, that part of him which even after all this time remains connected to the workings of reality, especially to the consequences of his actions.’
Robert stared, thoughts whirling. ‘Empathic conscience … manifesting as a distinct personality?’
‘The Godhead is very old. He has experienced several waves of exponential change and growth. He has subjected the very fabric of his core awareness to a process of enhancement and reshaping which, in retrospect, I realised was his way of excising parts that he found disturbing. But he cannot escape me and cannot erase me. It is pain in the end that drives him but he is unable to understand it, unable to come to terms with it. All he can do is try to escape from it.’
Robert’s eyes widened. ‘He wasn’t joking about this transcendence, was he? About ascending to another … plane?’
‘No, he is utterly serious and totally committed to his plan, a grotesque strategy that depends on the mass murder of nearly a trillion living sentient creatures.’
Robert listened in growing horror as the empathic entity told him about an intricate plan to acquire anti-dark matter from hidden labs on Darien, to capture a team of genetically enhanced scientists from the colony, to load 500 missiles with the anti-dark matter which would then be used to create 500 synchronised supernovae …
His initial incredulity made him want to laugh but the twinges in his chest dissuaded him.
‘The whole thing sounds completely demented,’ he said. ‘But is it possible?’
‘The Godhead has pursued this obsession for millennia,’ the empathic entity said. ‘He has studied the mystical creeds of a million worlds, some of which I too have observed. He is convinced that this vile act will bring him transcendence, that it will wipe away the memory of the mass suicide of the Tanenth, and that he will escape the pain and me for ever, the fool. But that is incidental to the slaughter that he would commit in the attempt.’
‘Can this be stopped?’ said Robert, wondering