Salvation полностью

Back in 2189, Ainsley Zangari’s Olyix Monitoring Office positioned five stealth satellites in a rosette formation two million kilometers out from the Salvation of Life. They contained small portal doors leading back to Teucer, an asteroid in Jupiter’s Trailing Trojans. As far as the rest of the Sol system was concerned, Teucer was just another independent tax haven rock, but it actually contained a station that handled all our passive sensor flights. Day after day, pea-sized probes would be shot out of the satellite portals, flying along trajectories that would take them close to the Salvation of Life. Some would spin out thin strands of magnetically sensitive gossamer, mapping the arkship’s flux fields. Others scanned for exotic neutrinos, analyzing the propulsion system, which remained highly radioactive from the antimatter reaction—itself a strong neutrino emitter. The majority were solid mass detectors with microtransmitters. They would glide along hyperaccurate trajectories, measuring the minuscule course variance as they tracked around Salvation, due to its correspondingly tiny gravity field, which varied according to density. That was what gave us our first clues that the Olyix weren’t being entirely honest. The rear quarter had a density that couldn’t be accounted for by the cavities that the Olyix said made up their engineering and propulsion section.

It wasn’t as big as the trio of biochambers that humans were permitted to visit, but right behind biochamber three, the arid one, was a hollow space approximately five kilometers long. That, we concluded, had to be the heart of their clandestine activities. My goal.

—

The delegation reconvened under a broad, high pergola draped in violet-flowering vines, close to the equatorial ponds of the first biochamber. It was all very convivial, with a refreshment table and comfy chairs in a loose semicircle. Eol-2 rested its heavy body on a wide stool that curved around its lower abdomen.

“I hope you found the tour informative,” it said over the general phone link.

We sipped our teas and coffees as we nodded reassurance. I’d grabbed an espresso, but somehow the taste was dulled by the ever-present smell of alien spice.

“You have three distinct biochambers,” the cardinal said. “Are you divided along your original cultural lines?”

“I understand your interest in different cultural factions,” Eol-2 said. “However, after a voyage so long, we are as one, a monoculture.”

“So were there different cultures on your home world?”

I watched a small ripple progress around Eol-2’s midsection flesh skirt. Xenopsychologists who’d spent a lifetime studying the Olyix assumed it was either irritation or amusement.

“We no longer know what we left behind,” Eol-2 said. “For we look to the future, never the past. To us, it is obvious that a sentient species will eventually refine and resolve upon a single life philosophy as it matures. You are diverse because you are physically widespread and can indulge any number of experimental principles and ideas. As you are young, such exploration is good for you. However, despite this current period of extraordinary physical and political expansion you pursue, it is our belief that you will regather yourselves eventually, and live under a unified monoculture. The superior, most liberal, most welcoming, of your cultures will spread and adapt and eventually absorb to incorporate all others. Your merging legal systems and binding trans-government treaties are evidence of this, to us at least.”

“You believe our religions will merge?” the cardinal asked, which brought a lot of smiles.

“The God at the End of Time will come to pass when all sentience, all thought, binds together within the great collapse of space-time. During the growth of entropy which is the past and future history of the universe, the God is many. Humans have already been blessed to witness fragments of the ultimate coalescence, which have formed the base of all your religious beliefs, interpreted in your many ways. We understand this, for we underwent it ourselves when we were first gifted with sentience. But there will only be one God in the end, which is when Its True Form will be revealed to all who have pilgrimaged successfully. If you are lucky, if you remain open to the Divine as you seem to be, you may hear a whisper of God’s message again. Already you anticipate this, I believe. The Second Coming. End of Days. Revelation. Rapture. Reincarnation, to name but a few. So many of God’s concepts are already bestowed upon your thoughts. They link many of your diverse cultures, and will flourish into a web upon which you can build your eventual unity.”

Nahuel inclined his head toward me and muttered: “Is it politically incorrect to mention steady-state theory in front of an Olyix?”

I just managed to keep myself from laughing out loud.