And so it was war he wanted to bring. The three of them were a living spearhead, and they were going to stab into the brain of the oncoming Architect. What else was there? Nobody thought they’d win, not anymore. Perhaps they’d manage a nomadic existence like the Naeromathi, limping from system to system. Stripping worlds to build more ships, so they could limp some more. Or perhaps they’d be gone, like Harbinger Ash’s people. No doubt there were many other races they’d never know, because they had been so thoroughly and comprehensively removed from the universe.
The Partheni captain knew they were courting death. She didn’t hesitate, though. Idris and the others wanted to fly straight into the teeth of the Architect, and so they went. They were a tiny fleck of dust against that barbed landscape as it readied itself to turn Far Lux into another barren sculpture.
Idris imagined his mind like origami, small, so small. All the complexity of it folded down to a point, so he could drive it deep into the vastness of the Architect. They’d learned that whole expanse was the entity’s mind, as well as its substance. He could feel Olumu and Tess making the same preparations. They couldn’t coordinate, not quite, but they struck almost simultaneously. Their minds ranged across the outer reaches of the enemy, prying for a way in, becoming ever smaller, smaller . . . until they could slip their consciousnesses into the radiant labyrinth of its being. Then they could chase through the canals of its thoughts, looking for something to break, something to tear.
The voices of the Partheni crew were in his ears, reporting and receiving orders. Every slight variance within the Architect was measured and broadcast back to the planet. So that the data could travel with the refugees and get back to the Program. Because there was always another battle to prepare for, another lesson to learn. Nobody knew this would be the end.
Idris struck. His mind was a lance, driven as far as it would go into his enemy. He sought vulnerable tissue, baffled by the sheer scale of it. As well try to stab a man to death with a needle an atom wide. He clawed at it. He screamed in the halls of its brain, beat his fists against the walls of its mind, and it didn’t sense him. It felt the intrusion, but didn’t understand what he was. He was turbulence, interference, static. A bad dream. But he was nothing it recognized in any meaningful way. The Architect trembled ever so slightly as the three Intermediaries tried to break it, and just shouldered on. Then the Yennenga fell back as the nightmare accelerated towards Far Lux. It had singled out the system’s inhabited world, as Architects always did. Because they must have their art, and their art demanded death.
No Architect ever reworked a lifeless desert world into a planet-sized sculpture. Idris knew they understood the teeming lives they snuffed out, and he hated them for it. In that moment something in him broke and he made himself big again, inside its mind. He unfolded all that careful origami, shattered that needle point, pressed himself against every wall at once, inside his mind, inside its mind . . . and he pushed outwards.
On the bridge of the Yennenga he’d been screaming, lying on the floor with the captain shouting for a medic. He’d been rigid, muscles wrenching at bones so that he’d ache for a solid month after. Idris’s face had been awash with tears from clenched-shut eyes, blood flowed from his nose, spittle from his locked-open mouth.
And Idris had been there. With it. All that maze of complexity within the Architect had focused, in that moment, into a single consciousness. This was an entity with the power to reshape worlds, and he had its attention. Not a mote of dust in its eye, not a pebble beneath its foot or a thorn pricking its thumb. He had a mind, as it had a mind. He was a thing that, minuscule as he was, it saw as real.
He’d roared in: hating, angry, terrified. He’d driven into the Architect’s mind on a flame of negative emotions, knowing only that it was the executioner of worlds. And now he touched the truth of it. He understood that until now no human – perhaps no denizen of any planet it had ruined, in its millennia of life – had ever existed for it. At his/its back was the world of Far Lux. And Idris could see through its senses that the planet was mottled with a kind of rot, a disfiguring decay that the Architect needed to clear away. That rot was thought, the collected minds of all the people living there. They exerted a pressure on the fabric of space that the Architect, for reasons Idris had never grasped, felt the need to release.
For a measureless time he and the Architect had confronted one another. He had sampled the immensity of its mind and it had taken a magnifying lens and studied him, as a human might examine a microbe. A thing so small that it might as well not be there at all. He had no anger left, at that point. There was nothing of the white-hot fire that had taken him so far. Such emotions withered and died in the face of that godlike scrutiny. How foolish it was to rage over the deaths of so many microbes, the extermination of something almost invisible.