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horizon: the number of multitudes beyond that horizon are irrelevant. It has
become a simple decision for me. Eternal boredom, death, or take a chance.
Open the Gates. They know Flux they must know it far better than we, for they
are coming from the source of all Flux. They promised to make us gods, and we
are already gods as far as World is concerned. What do they mean by the term?
What kind of beings are they? What kind of place do they come from? These are
the only questions left for me. the only challenge, the only game. With that
much power they certainly did not grow bored. It is a chance, one I am willing
to take."
"And if the other side is right, and they are here to kill or enslave us all?"
Varishnikar Stomsk asked worriedly. "What then? With their knowledge and power
we could hardly stop them."
"True. It might be some monstrous version of us out there, more powerful than
we could ever know. So then my choices are death or death. So, of the
possibilities, two are death and one is godhood. Two to one odds against are
not the best, but they are the best I have. And if you have not reached my
point where I would grab those odds and embrace them with all my heart and
soul you will one day, and the votes might not be there to save you. either.
Discussion?"
There was a telling deadly silence, with each of them looking not at Ivan or
each other but within themselves. For many, being so brutally honest with
themselves was a new and revealing experience. Finally it was
Gifford Haldayne who said, quietly, "Let's take a vote."
Ivan nodded and looked at them all, his expression still grim. "Rosa
Haldayne?"
"I'm getting a little sick of it myself. You're right, Zell it's all or
nothing. Open them."
"Gifford Haldayne?"
"Why not? All the interesting enemies are dead."
"I take that as a yes. Chua Gabaye?"
"I never would have considered anything but a yes vote. All or nothing,
darling always."
"Ming Tokiabi?"
She hesitated a moment, as if still undecided. Finally she said, "Yes,"
without elaboration.
"Varishnikar Stomsk?"
"Our ancestors sealed the Gates almost twenty-seven hundred years ago now, and
World as we know it and see it today is the end result. Had they been able to
see what we've become, they would never have closed those Gates
never!
Better the end, better slavery, better anything than this!
Hell, yes!"
All eyes now turned to the seventh and newest member, Coydt van Haas'
replacement. He alone would now decide, and he alone had the most stake in
keeping things as they were.
"I know what you all are thinking," he said. "With burgeoning power and new
discoveries being made almost daily, and with me ranking high on the side that
will win, why should I? It might interest you to know what I am really like,
inside. I want a different thing than the rest of you; I want the ultimate
power. I want to know everything.
It is not enough to know that something works, or how it works I must know why
it works, what forces and principles guide it. I want to know everything.
That is power to me, and that is my dream. Godhood is not being worshipped by
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slaves, nor is it creating a little world of your own design by sheer force of
will, as if you just told a machine to do it and then it read your mind and
did exactly what you desired.
Godhood is knowing how to build that machine, how it works, how it does what
it does. Wizards aren't gods, they are machine operators lowly operators;
button-pushers and switch-throwers
and they're too ignorant to even realize that fact. I want to understand why
and how it works.
"And I cannot know," he sighed. "We have sunk too far. We hold the end product
of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in our hands, but that chain of
accumulated knowledge is denied us. It was cut off when the Gates were closed.
In thousands of years we might be able to reinvent it, but as friend Zelligman
points out, we are mortal gods, liable to be victims ourselves eventually or
victims of our own minds. Human culture is not going in the direction of
rediscovery, either, but into a permanent dark age of the mind. I am
pessimistic, and I am impatient. That chain of knowledge exists, somewhere on
the other side of those Gates.
"There is a fellow in New Eden right now, the very same Matson who killed
Coydt van Haas.
He suggests a fourth alternative, Zelligman, one that may be far-fetched but
which nonetheless tips the odds a bit more in our favor. He suggests that it
might be possible to defeat them if they are an enemy. If we defeated them, we
would be capable again with an irresistible lure to discover and link up once
more with our relatives who created this world. Not two to one, but perhaps
three to two still against, but I am willing. No. I am compelled to vote yes."
Zelligman Ivan sighed and sank back in his chair. "The resolution is adopted
unanimously with the chair, obviously, voting yes. Now I'm going to tell you
exactly how we are going to do it."
Neither Mervyn nor anyone else had ever seen pain and anguish on Matson's face
before, but it was certainly there now and he couldn't conceal it. It had
taken almost five months to find Sondra in the still rampant confusion of the
enlarged New Eden, and Matson still could hardly believe that the one he had
was his daughter. She neither looked nor acted in any way like her, and only
the tattooed name on her rump indicated any connection with the woman he'd
raised.
After months of relative inactivity while he got the lay of the land and
determined his next movies, Mervyn was suddenly in a hurry. Still he would
not, could not, desert Matson and Sondra at this time.
The wizard identified her at once, and took her inside his small office in his
new and increasingly permanent Flux haven, but before he went to work he
talked with Matson.
"This won't be easy," he warned the stringer. "Even with all my power and
experience, the fact is I revert to that New Eden body I have every time I
sleep or relax for a while. I've found, too, like many other wizards caught in
it who got out, my power is diminished. It's part of a worldwide
situation that much Flux removed has caused perhaps a fifteen percent overall
decline in everyone's powers and abilities. Those caught inside when it blew
lost additional power, since whatever power was needed to stave off complete
domination by that damnable program was quite literally lost."
"What's that mean in layman's terms?"
"It means, first of all, that their attack and assimilation spell, being
written in the same language as the landscape spell, got appended to it.
Everyone caught in it was essentially made a part of the new reality, so that
my default body, my genetic makeup, is not my old self but this new one.
That's why I've kept it it takes a lot of will to keep any other form."
"You mean that what's in there now may be a spell creation, but it's replaced
her real self?
There's nothing of me or her mother in her?"
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Mervyn nodded. "I'm afraid so. Second, my powers are still considerable, but
they are perhaps sixty percent of what they were. That's still better than
almost everybody else's eighty-five percent, but it's a major decrease. As
strong as I was, look at how much damage it did to me. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]