Transformation Space - Marianne de Pierres [30]
Tekton let his focus withdraw from the Baronessa and slip back among the coloured lights. He tried concentrating in different places, and quickly became adept at controlling the speed and flow of the images.
It’s an instinctive system, logic-mind mused. Designed for humanesque minds. Even uneducated ones.
Bit like a recognition game, observed free-mind.
No. It employs simple logic, logic-mind said. Like this … and this …
Tekton began to group images to form rough linear timelines, and practised the knack of viewing concurrent events.
The device itself was a pure delight, responding to a variety of physical and neurological cues from its user. Tekton knew he could lose himself for days, dipping into the affairs of the galaxy and the permutations of the elegant arrangement of information – if, that is, the news out there had been better.
As it was, what Tekton saw shook his composure. The galactic war which Mira Fedor had prophesied to the summit just hours earlier had already begun.
Tekton flipped between terrifying spectacles. Entire systems were being swarmed by Geni-carriers. Thousands upon thousands of incendiaries descended into the atmospheres of habited worlds.
Many of the DSD‘s recorder eges had been damaged, transmitting barely discernible images of dense dust clouds where populated moons should be. Others showed the partial obliteration of colonies, and still more sent footage of suffering and carnage.
Worse than that, the Geni-carriers had targeted the galaxy’s grandest architectural achievements – structures and designs which attracted billions of tourists. The bridges between the Latour moons now hung rent and broken, like tentacles torn free from the body of a huge sea creature. Who knew how many had perished during their destruction? There were over a million tourists inside the Great Diorama Well of Mapoor, helplessly trapped within sightseeing gondolas as the kaleidoscopic walls around them began to implode.
Outrage, horror and despair consumed Tekton, drowning out any rationale that his logic-mind could offer. How could anyone … any thing… perpetrate such ruin … such sacrilege?
All our greatest achievements, free-mind wailed. Everything that we are. Everything we strive for. All our beauty.
The only tiny sliver of hope the DSD afforded him was that his home world, Lostol, had been one of those who’d heeded the Baronessa’s warning. The Lostolians had disabled their shift spheres, preventing the Geni-carriers from entering their system. Tekton could not detect their shift signatures, which meant that the Post-Species had likely bypassed Lostol.
Relief was replaced by more anxiety. He was cut off from his family, which pained him despite the fact that he seldom communed with them. Doris Mueller, his mother Alaman, uncle Tolos, the Tadao Ando studium … All were beyond his reach.
Unreasonable sentimentality! Logic-mind had to bellow at him to be heard over his worrying. When was the last time you spoke to Alaman or Tolos? Or even wondered what they were doing?
Tekton nodded to himself. Logic-mind was right. To weep over lost familial connections was asinine, but this mass destruction of the galaxy’s architectural monuments, that was completely deplorable. Unacceptable.
In addition to his marrow-deep outrage and grief, Tekton was besieged by a wave of momentous guilt. From his glimpses into the chaos propagating throughout Orion, Tekton deduced that OLOSS was gathering in multiple locations, planning reciprocation. But its forces were fractured, blinded by the breakdown of res-shift and without a clear leader. Lasper Farr’s ship appeared to be stranded in the vicinity of Bellatrix, apart from the rest of its fleet, and Farr was without the device that had clearly allowed him to stay one step ahead.
I’ve stolen his prescience, and the OLOSS worlds will pay.
The Godhead closed his eyes and his mind to the device, and fell back onto the bed, curling into a tight ball. Tears leaked from his narrow seldom-used tear ducts,