Divination - John French Read online

  I thought of the cables of crystal and stone threading though the reactor spaces, of the whisper on the noosphere channels and the power and heat draining from the world around this… tomb.

  ‘We must go,’ I said, and was already lifting Thamus-91’s remains and moving for the hatch out to the world above. Ishta-1-Gamma followed. As we climbed back up to the outer skin of the god, I looked back and thought for a second I saw a face looking up at me from the black circle of the hatchway. I began to climb faster and did not look down again.

  Ishta-1-Gamma’s noosphere halo turned slowly as she entered my workshop.

 

  She advanced from the door as it sealed behind her. I watched her as I parsed the symbols walking across the parchment spooling from the data-font. I saw her reach out and take an inert plasma coil-disc from my tertiary workbench. She did not look at it, but rolled it between her hands. The gesture had no purpose to it. It was enough to make me halt all my activity. You must understand, nothing in the Priesthood of Mars is without purpose; everything is of the machine and no part of the machine lacks purpose.

  I watched her as the data-font clattered and the buzz of cogitator and power transfers dimmed from a cackle to a hum. She seemed to realise what she had done after three seconds. Her noospheric halo flashed through static as she replaced the coil-disc on the workbench, blurting the canticle input of harmony across all primary frequencies.

  she said.

  I replied. She shifted, looking around the workspace at the test components lying under their seals, and parchments of quieting.

  I waited.

  She had not been the same since that first excursion into the Artefact-ZA01. We had made a full report to Atropos about the demise of Thamus-91. The senior magos had accepted the data, but had requested no clarification or further analysis. I could not help but form a list of possible ideas as to why: the senior magos was uninterested in what had happened, the data that we supplied needed no further clarification or the incident held no new data. This last possibility clung to me. Atropos did not ask for further data because the magos knew what had happened. It had happened before.

  Ishta-1-Gamma had demanded more data access. The reply from Atropos had been simple. If we wanted answers, wake the machine. If we wanted knowledge, wake the machine. If we wanted to perform our duty to Omnissiah and knowledge, wake the machine.

  We protested, but neither of us had demanded to leave. We had remained, and begun work to do just what Atropos had said. We had worked to wake the machine.

  Why? Even now I am not certain as to the answer, or rather, I am not certain there is an answer that would satisfy logic. We like to think that choices are rational, like the turning of cogs, that we leave the weakness of the irrational behind as we shed the weakness of flesh. But the question that does not arise in all the coda of the Omnissiah is whether the irrational fears that pulse in blood and beat in our chests when we wake in the night are not weakness, but warnings left on the edge of the darkness.

  We were priests of the machine. Knowledge is sacred, and there is nothing higher than knowledge lost to the past. The artefact… the Titan in that tomb… there was knowledge in it, great and terrible knowledge waiting just out of sight yet close enough to grasp. You cannot understand, perhaps, what that means, what that demands of us. It calls to the truth of all we are. And so we worked to wake the machine – I to kindle energy in its metal, Ishta-1-Gamma to allow a human to interface with its systems. She worked with a focus and diligence that I have never seen.

  We assayed the artefact further, accessed rituals from the Collegia Titanica archives granted us by Zavius and created test rituals that grew sacred theory into a harmony and order. Weeks, weeks and weeks with the cold and silence, weeks of the finest work perhaps I have ever been a part of. All of it bringing us to a threshold.

  Ishta-1-Gamma asked after twenty-four seconds of silence.

 

  Her aura expanded for a second, flashed with bright and subtle formulae.

 

  A brighter flash, a spiral of calculations in the data link.

 

 

  I moved to the tertiary workbench she had stopped by and moved the plasma coil-disc she had handled the 1.4 mm required for it to be resting in the correct position. I stated.

  she asked.

 

 

 

 

  I replied.

 

  I asked.

 

 

 

  In truth, the same possibilities and questions had been rising unbidden in my mind with regular frequency since the first expedition into Artefact-ZA01. But I could not form a full and logical chain of inference from them.

 

  She reached her hand inside her robes and removed a data-cylinder of milled brass – 0.75 cm in diameter, 6.6 cm in length. She placed it on the workbench. I looked at it.

  I asked.

 

  I said, looking at, but not touching, the cylinder.

 

  I looked back at the data-cylinder, then picked it up.

  Ishta-1-Gamma transmitted a negation.

 

  she transmitted.