Memories were filtering up inside her mind. Memories that had never been erased or transferred into safe storage at any of her rejuvenations. Memories she’d assumed were dormant. Right after her parents’ trial she’d gone back to the hotel with her police escort. That had been a big new tower in Marindra’s capital, with its cube rooms and clean new furniture and air-conditioning. The escort had left her alone, giving her a break before the Huxley’s Haven government official arrived to take her “home.” Now the trial was over, she didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to fill her time, no school to go to, no Coya to hang out with, no boys to eye up. She sat on the bed, perched on the edge looking out through the big picture window at the capital’s skyline, and waited. Strange things happened inside her head—Coya’s hysterical crying and pleading was still echoing around in there—and while her eyes looked through the window all she could actually see was her parents being led from the dock. Her father’s head hung low as his dreams and hopes lay broken around him. Her mother, equally haggard. But Rebecca turned to look across the court, meeting her stolen stepdaughter’s gaze, and mouthed: “I love you.”
In her small, empty Paris apartment Paula whispered, “I love you, too, Mum.” Then just as she had in that hotel room a hundred sixty years ago, Paula Myo started crying.
…
Preparation had taken many months, vast amounts of resources and industrial capacity had been diverted from the expansion expedition being mounted on the other side of the interstellar wormhole, but MorningLightMountain was finally ready. The other immotiles had been forming alliances that might eventually challenge its dominance. They were worried about its new technology. It knew that they had been experimenting with wormhole construction; its quantum wave detectors had picked up the telltale fluctuations from many settlements across the Prime system. If it didn’t act now, they would soon reach parity, its advantage would be lost permanently.
Three hundred twenty-eight wormholes were opened in unison. They were small, each of them measuring a meter and a half wide. Just enough for a ten-megaton warhead to pass through. The wormholes closed.
MorningLightMountain had opened them next to the primary groupings of all the other immotiles on the planet, inside the ultrastrong protective force fields that guarded them from the sky, and next to the sprawling buildings that sheltered and nurtured them. The warheads detonated immediately, wiping out every motile and immotile within a twenty-five-kilometer radius. Even as the first round of nukes were exploding, MorningLightMountain was opening the wormholes again, this time at the next series of targets, the subsidiary immotiles orbiting the Prime homeworld. After that it targeted the first of the two solid planets, the second. Then came the innermost gas giant, its moons, the asteroid habitats, the outermost gas giant, industrial stations. The wave of obliteration rippled out across the system for over a day. Not that many of the remaining immotile groupings ever knew they were at war; they had little or no warning of their doom. MorningLightMountain’s wave of assaults traveled across the star system faster than the speed of light.
When it was over, when every other immotile grouping had been reduced to a lake of radioactive lava, MorningLightMountain used the wormholes again. This time it sent connections through, microwaves or fiber-optic cable, inserting itself into the core-less communications networks of its vanquished rivals. Its thoughts and orders flooded into the minds of the surviving motiles, expelling their mental heritage, turning MorningLightMountain into the sole sentient entity in the star system. Every motile was enmeshed in its thoughts as it took control of the infrastructure and spaceships that remained. For over a week it sent its billions of new motiles out to survey the wreckage and list the mechanical systems that had survived unscathed. Most of the farms and food production plants had come through intact, as had a great many industrial facilities. The information was used to assemble a strategy for integration, bringing together every production center in a single unified organization. It began to amalgamate thousands of motiles into new subsidiary groupings of itself to cope with the huge demands of managing an entire star system. Without rivalries, and acting in conjunction, the combined industrial output of every manufacturing plant was greater than before.
Synergy,the Bose memories called it. The alien’s concepts and words still lingered and lurked amid MorningLightMountain’s system-wide thoughts, even though the coherent article had long been erased. It had even taken the precaution of physically eradicating the immotile unit that the Bose memories had been stored in. All that remained now were memories of memories, disseminated information that manifested in the odd alien phrase. There was no concern left of possible contamination. It was pure now, a single life that lived throughout this star system, and was now expanding into a second.
The effort to reach the Commonwealth resumed, with hundreds of ships flying daily through the interstellar wormhole to the staging post star system, carrying equipment that would build the next sequence of wormholes.
Out of all the hundreds of billions of motiles hurrying to perform their appointed tasks, one did not obey MorningLightMountain’s instructions. Because such individuality was impossible to a Prime, it moved where it wanted and saw what it needed. No other motile possessed the kind of independent thought structure that would question it; as long as it avoided the attention of MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines it was perfectly safe to come and go as it pleased.
For over a day it had been moving around the base of the giant mountain building that contained the original heart of the massive interlinked creature that was MorningLightMountain. It didn’t move as smoothly as all the other motiles, it wasn’t used to four legs, nor the strange way they bent and twisted. But it made progress.
In the background of its mind were the directives and thoughts of MorningLightMountain, emerging from the little communications device attached to one of its nerve receptor stalks. It ignored them because it wanted to, a mental ability that other motiles did not have. Although the images and information coming out of the communications device were a useful guide to what was happening across the Prime system.
High above it, dazzling lightning bolts lashed down repetitively against the protective force field dome, sizzling away to ground out along the top of the ancient valley. Clouds boiled along at a speed it had never seen before. They were thick and black, blotting out the sky as they unleashed monsoon-like downpours several times an hour. So heavy was the unnatural rain that rivulets formed across the force field, carrying away the water to the saturated ground beyond. Whole tides of mud were slithering around the protected, sacrosanct valley.
The motile regarded the new weather intently, with one thought starting to dominate its mind: Nuclear winter.
…
Paula Myo took the express from Paris direct to Wessex. She had a long wait in the CST planetary station there; the train to Huxley’s Haven only ran once a day. It was dark outside when she eventually went to platform 87B, which was situated in a small annex at the end of the terminal. The train she found standing there was made up from four single deck carriages being pulled by a steam engine that could have come straight out of a museum. She’d forgotten that the journey was on a historical throwback. On any other world such a contraption belching out thick black smoke from the coal it burned would have been prohibited under any number of antipollution laws; here on one of the Big15 nobody cared.
She climbed into the first carriage and sat on one of the velvet bench seats. A couple of other people came in, and ignored her. Just before their scheduled departure time a guard walked down the carriage. He was dressed in a dark blue uniform that had bright silver buttons down the waistcoat, and a tall peaked cap with red piping.