PART 5
BERLENHOF
22.
Idris
In the seventy-eighth year of the war, an Architect came to Berlenhof.
Idris had put out in the Pythoness. All the Intermediaries at Berlenhof had been deployed, sent out in separate ships on an eggs and baskets basis. All of them, bending their minds towards the Architect. Motes in the eye of its vast crystalline grandeur.
A bulk like a moon, its near half a crazed mountain range of gleaming crystal spines a hundred kilometres long. The light of Berlenhof’s star touched them and gave back rainbows, cut apart into its constituent frequencies. The dark side of the Architect was a faceted hemisphere, semi-translucent, monstrous suggestions of form all the way down. A machine or a rogue world or a force of nature; no mere human could fathom it.
Saint Xavienne had seen further than most, though. There was a singular mind at the heart of all that crystal, a consciousness as vast as oceans. The Architect possessed a will and the ability to inflict that will upon the universe. And it was one of many. Only one had come to Berlenhof – only one had ever been seen at once – but human science had already discovered distinct flourishes attributable to individuals, at the macro and molecular level. They were not a lone threat, but a crusade.
The Pythoness arrowed in under the direction of its Partheni crew, dodging back and forth. A little ship trying to get Idris close, without that awful invisible hand turning them into artfully refigured scrap. And somewhere out there, Idris’s classmates had been dying.
The Partheni crew, Solace’s sisters, handled the little launch adroitly. They were following patterns – hard-learned from ships that had evaded Architect notice for just long enough to get away. Except this time they weren’t trying to get away.
And Idris was young and a fool and thought he wanted to fight.
‘Elsinore reports contact . . .’ an officer was translating Partheni chatter for him. ‘Ching Shi reports contact. Ocasio in contact.’ She was listing the other Int-carriers that had engaged the Architect.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Menheer Telemmier,’ said the Pythoness’s captain in heavily accented Colvul, as she flicked his shoulder. Idris realized he’d been holding back. He opened his senses, his expensive, ruinous new senses, and found the Architect.
He had expected to feel a point, a single seat of reason deep in the crystal depths of the behemoth. Instead it was all mind, the entire multi-million-tonne edifice. Or maybe its mind and its substance had no meaningful division. He met a will like God, as amenable to his fighting it as the physical vastness would be if the Pythoness had turned its little weapons against those jagged mountains of crystal. He was peripherally aware of the efforts of his fellows. They were grappling for purchase against the smooth wall of its intellect, beating their mental fists against it. Trying for that moment Saint Xavienne had achieved – when she had touched the mind of God and stopped leviathan in its tracks.
And for one brief moment, he had it. He’d made himself not vaster, but smaller. He’d shrunk his image of himself until he could somehow slide himself into that mind. As subtle as a card slipped beneath a door, inviting himself, making the entity ‘Idris Telemmier of the Intermediary Program’ nothing but data. He was a virus bearing a message: We’re here. Notice us!
There was a shout in impenetrable Parsef, followed for his benefit by, ‘It’s making a two-degree deflection, Menheer!’ Words came to his ears from somewhere far off. The Architect had changed its course slightly. He had found some lever within it. Perhaps it was just a machine? Perhaps he could hack it with his mind, find the steering systems, find the self-destruct . . .
More rapid discussion, and then the translation came, urgent and hurried. ‘Registering disruption across its surface. Is that damage?’ Partheni were rock calm, everyone knew. They bred them without emotions, the perfect soldier-angels. Except there was excitement in those words, elation even. They were having an effect. They were wrestling with Lucifer, about to cast him down.
And yet, even once he was in, Idris was aware he had not struck the target. There was indeed a self there, the thing that Xavienne had brushed, but he could wander the maze of its mind for a thousand years and never find it. Even getting as far as any human ever had, they had failed. They had pricked it, discomfited it, but it was no more than a momentary jab, a thorn to the hide of an elephant.
He felt the shudder build up within it, and he was trying to warn them, opening his mouth wide to vomit the words out, still lost somewhere between I and It . . . when the Architect took space between its sightless hands and wrung it.