Gill had heard only vague stories about the subspace whirls,93 considered by most Antyrans to be little more than a bunch of wild assumptions and known in detail by just a few theorists from the Matter Tower in Alixxor. Although the Antyrans had mastered nuclear fusion, they had serious gaps in understanding the laws of nature—not the least due to the cage of the firewall, which didn’t allow them to see the universe and test their assumptions. But for all the meagerness of his knowledge, he imagined that falling into the center of a subspace whirl had to be the same as touching Ugo’s expansion.
Even though the jure’s singularity would need a humongous amount of time to reach all the corners of space and time, even though the change would truly stop only at the end of all things, for those close to the god—like the neighboring worlds of Mapu and Antyra—the expansion front would arrive swiftly, without the slightest warning. His civilization would become extinct faster than a tailbeat.
Perhaps tired of loneliness, the god would dream. And what dreams! He could dream of anything—or, better to say, he could dream everything. That would be the only consolation, to live again—even briefly—in an abomination’s infinite imagination. Sandara once told him: “We are what we dream!” Could it be that this resumed the whole existence, the whole experience of being alive? The whole struggle, all the suffering of his little world ripped by conflict, would end up as a dream of a giant cannibal bacteria—lonely and bored to death—its tentacles as long as the universe?
If he left the destroyer, he risked letting the madness unfold. It was true that after reaching the Federals, he could tell them about the Sigian ship and the abomination hidden in its memory. He had a foreboding that the prospect of Ugo’s expansion wouldn’t necessarily overwhelm them with joy. In fact, he was pretty sure that their fleets would start hunting the monster to solve the crisis—that is, of course, if the jure’s intelligence didn’t prove to be above theirs, allowing him to hide too well to be found…
But why would Ugo risk being hunted by the Federal armies instead of killing Gill before he could raise the alarm?
Now that he was rid of the parasite, Gill decided it made sense to test the nodes of the continuum, even though he held no hope of finding a saving crack. And just as expected, as soon as he smelled the paths opened in the fabric of the future, certainty took the place of suspicion: Ugo had left him alive not because he had a head injury and suddenly felt he couldn't kill him, but because the jure needed him alive to copy his algorithms—more exactly, to move them, because he was unable to copy his code, as Sandara explained. After he transferred Uralia, Ugo moved his hideous entity inside the destroyer’s memory, thus being forced—probably to his great regret—to let go of his grip. That’s why Gill was still alive, apparently free to roam the ship… but not free to leave the planet.
Of course, in Ugo’s present situation, there were some small technicalities in the way of an ordinary murder, like the fact that the jure—being a bit dead—was lacking the required limbs with which to handle various skull-crushing objects. And he couldn’t repeat the elegant method used to get rid of Baila’s fat initiate. Nevertheless, Gill was convinced that the jure would manage to overcome the obstacles with the characteristic ingenuity he had always shown. What if he hid a “surprise” in the bracelet? Perhaps he overwrote some commands, turning it into a lethal trap. Or maybe he didn’t waste time with such risky finesses—after all, Gill could keep the bracelet deactivated until he reached Antyra’s outskirts—and would just fly the Sigian destroyer out of the hill to blast the Grammian ship to pieces before it even reached orbit. Or perhaps he had prepared another, even more spectacular way to shut off his kyi’s smell… After all, it didn’t matter how Ugo planned for him to die, as long as the jure followed the paths before him to ensure that all were leading to the same end.
“Ugo!” he shouted again.
And suddenly, as he stood gloomy and confused, he realized that he knew all too well what he had to do, because there was only one alternative. The idea had landed in his kyi some time ago, but he chased it out of his way, refusing to consciously think about it. And not only out of fear that Ugo-of-the-bracelet might have read his intentions, but mostly because it wasn’t meant for him to contemplate it. Now, however, the time had come to accept it bravely, to step on a path from where he’d have little chance to return alive. But Ugo would lose anyway. He had already lost without knowing it. Yet.
Gill gathered all his strength to put in motion what he had to do. He knew the monster was way too smart to be fooled by some clumsy pretense—he had to be truly decided to go to the bitter end to defeat the abomination.
He took a deep breath, realizing with satisfaction that he again became the one who picked his future, even if the future was going to be short and soaked in blood—and he wasn’t choosing only his future but that of the other beings in the galaxy.
He tensed his whole body, prepared to fight the terror of the approaching death, the begging for a minute of delay… Instead of that, he felt an un-Antyran feeling of tranquility, and for the first time in his life, his thoughts really quelled, letting him hear the silence from behind the words hidden in the depths of his kyi.
“Death is only the beginning,” he whispered the first sentence of the Sacred Book Inrumiral, hoping—after so many years of heresy—that behind the prophet’s words lay a crumble of truth.
Gill pulled out the bracelet. He put it back on his arm and then immediately tried to take it off, without activating it. The self-destruct alarm started to shrill loudly, and he realized, surprised, that it didn’t terrify him as he was afraid it would. He didn’t have to fight the impulse to enter the code, to stop the devastating blast about to come. He had gotten accustomed to the sight of death; it became part of his kyi. He had the feeling that he wasn’t on the destroyer’s floor—he was a spectator, watching with cold indifference the drama unfolding under the ruins of an alien city.
A portion of a wall awoke to life, becoming a screen, and Ugo’s mug appeared on it. He was in a meadow, surrounded by a tekal forest about to yield.
“Gill, did you cry for me?” he asked in a seemingly calm voice.
Gill utterly ignored him, focused on what the most important thing was. Life. He became aware more than ever that it whirled through his veins with the force of Belamia’s storm, pulsing from each cell and sipping gratefully every little shred of time offered. He felt his recessive gills dry. Zhan won’t accept me at his bosom. He imagined himself smiling ironically at the stupidity of the thought. Maybe I should be afraid of this, but I don’t feel any fear, he thought, surprised by the finding. His wounded kyi was screaming for silence, for the eternal peace he knew he richly deserved. He closed his eyes, waiting for the blast, waiting for the end of all madness, deciding to enjoy the force of the explosion.
“Have you lost your kyi? Activate the bracelet immediately!” Ugo ordered sharply. Then, in a split second, he realized he had been defeated.
The harrowing change, the crossing to the land of death that turned Ugo into a malformed creature affected—imperceptibly, at first smell—the way he analyzed Gill’s options. His arrogance, his desire turned into conviction that he was a god, erased from his kyi the very notion of suicide. In vain he was now thinking that he had no way of foreseeing the Antyran’s choice, because he had hundreds of years to smell his paths…