‘A touch is all it takes, Mr Gabion,’ said the Ambassador. ‘You offered a trade. Let us then fulfil our side of the bargain. This way, you’ll see and understand everything in an instant.’
Luc felt his eyes widen. ‘Like Javier Maxwell’s books. Is that the kind of thing you mean?’
‘Encoding memories into all manner of physical substrates is an art in itself,’ the Ambassador replied, briefly drawing his hand back and showing his palm to Luc. ‘There are almost no limits to the possible substrates that can be used, since the information is stored on the deep quantum level. It is possible, in the Coalition, to ingest or even drink memories and data – even to breathe them in. Living flesh, allied with a lattice of the type Antonov gifted you with, can become a conduit for sensory data of all kinds.’
Irrational fear gripped Luc. ‘The last time I was here,’ he said tightly, ‘I mentioned that Antonov told me in what I thought was a dream that you could prevent a calamity, and save both our lives.’
Something rocked the station around them. ‘Perhaps it’s safest to keep moving for the moment,’ said the Ambassador. ‘We can reach the flier in just a few more minutes.’
They passed into another part of the station, walking quickly through what appeared to be a series of laboratories linked one to another by a common passageway. Luc observed a number of sealed compartments with glass walls, within which lay samples of mosses and lichens.
‘I have another question for you,’ Luc called after the Ambassador as he strode ahead. ‘The lattice in my head. Did Antonov get it from you?’
The Ambassador turned to regard him as they came to a door at the end of the passageway. ‘He did, yes, but I had no part in what Antonov did to you. You must understand that.’
Ambassador Sachs next led him through a dusty reception area filled with mouldering couches. Sachs moved through the zero-gee environment with a fluid grace like he’d been born to it – and then Luc remembered that he had.
Luc also remembered the anger written across Antonov’s face, reflected in the Ambassador’s mirrored mask. ‘He wasn’t very happy with you, for some reason. I saw part of one of his memories. He was arguing with you, clearly extremely upset. Why?’
‘He believed we in the Coalition had dangerously underestimated Father Cheng’s determination to remain in power at all costs. Given what you’ve told us since your arrival here, it appears we entirely misjudged the situation. Once it became evident Cheng had no intention of bringing his explorations of the Founder Network to a halt, we began conducting private negotiations with both Javier Maxwell and Winchell Antonov. In return for Antonov’s help, and as a gesture of goodwill, we supplied him with certain technologies he might need if either he or Maxwell were to have any chance at deposing Cheng.’
‘Such as my lattice?’
‘Such as your lattice, yes.’
Despite everything he’d learned, a part of Luc was scandalized. ‘All this time, and the Coalition really has been working against the Tian Di?’
‘No, Mr Gabion, against Father Cheng and the Eighty-Five, specifically, and out of a desperation to avoid the war Cheng has forced us to initiate. If Cheng should remain in power and continue his exploration of the Founder Network, he risks driving the human race into extinction.’
‘You keep telling me that, but you haven’t explained what you mean.’
‘We offered to show you, but you refused.’
‘Tell me first.’
‘The Network is vast, Mr Gabion, a billion open doors scattered all across space and time and leading who knows where. Some of Cheng’s reconnaissance teams encountered something quite terrifying during one of their forays into it.’
‘What?’
‘Intelligent life,’ Sachs replied, and turned back to the door.
Sachs cycled the mechants through the airlock first, the door sealing behind them. The docking bay where his flier waited had, he explained, suffered a breach during the initial stages of the assault. The mechants would venture ahead in order to seal the breach, following which he and Luc would be able to continue on their way.
‘As vast as the Founder Network is,’ the Ambassador explained as they waited, ‘it’s difficult to imagine a universe in which such a thing did not exist, given what we know of the mutability of space and time. It seems to be a historical inevitability that any race advanced enough to discover the means to generate worm-holes would then use them as a fast way to access their nearest star systems. And, over time, these scattered networks inevitably fused together, becoming what we call the Founder Network.’
‘And that’s who the Sandoz encountered?’ asked Luc, unable to keep a note of awe out of his voice. ‘The Founders?’
‘Remember there is no evidence of there ever being any one race of Founders,’ the Ambassador cautioned. ‘The name is merely a collective term for an unknown number of intelligent species who independently created their own wormhole networks, but ultimately used them to access the networks of other species, over vast epochs of time. As you know, the Coalition have continued to explore the Network, despite the Schism, but always with the greatest caution imaginable. By our standards, Cheng’s expeditionary forces have been behaving in a manner almost suicidally reckless.’
‘For all your caution,’ Luc growled, ‘you still didn’t prevent someone travelling to one of your worlds to steal something that could be used to murder billions.’
‘Which is extremely unfortunate, if it does prove to be the case,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘and it reveals a serious lapse on our part. But to get back to the point, Mr Gabion, Cheng’s Sandoz teams were not the first to encounter alien life. We first made contact with the very same alien species a few decades after the Schism. At first, our discovery was a cause of celebration: first contact with another species, via the Network. But our joy didn’t last for long. If the creatures we encountered ever had a name for themselves, we never learned it, but it wasn’t long before we started calling them the Inimicals. Communication with them proved difficult from the start, indeed more or less impossible. There are many ways to build some kind of common language – by building mathematical and physical constants, for instance. At first we thought we might succeed in learning to communicate with them, and they with us; but every time we tried to advance beyond those initial building blocks towards anything remotely abstract, we ran into trouble.’
‘You mean you couldn’t understand them?’
The Ambassador shook his head. ‘Or they, us. They showed us images of one of their worlds, dotted with what we at first took to be cities, but then later proved to be graveyards, or perhaps some mixture of both. Every time we thought we had a grasp on how their minds worked or what they were trying to say to us, we’d find ourselves having to throw away all our carefully constructed strategies as new data came in.’ He shrugged. ‘Then things turned nasty.’
‘In what way?’
‘You must understand the extraordinary lengths we had gone to, from the very beginning, to prevent the Inimicals from uncovering the route back to our own time and space until we could be certain we would be safe. At the time we first encountered them, the Inimicals had already colonized an entire hub of the Network – thousands upon thousands of transfer gates placed in close orbit around a black hole with the mass of a million stars, located at the heart of a dying galaxy. We never knew just what triggered the hostilities – whether we somehow brought it on ourselves, or if they’d intended to attack us all along – but those of us who survived the attack in our physical forms managed to retreat and warn the rest. We destroyed transfer gates behind us as we went, hoping to block off their pursuit and prevent them from finding their way back to our own worlds, but had only limited success. The Inimicals had already spent millennia inside the Network, and knew routes through it we hardly knew existed. Our exploratory teams came under attack several more times over the next few decades, as the Inimicals attempted to find some way around our hastily erected defences. In response, we initiated research programmes that constructed weapons from certain artefacts we had recovered throughout the post-Abandonment period. Using these, we managed to halt the Inimicals’ progress – but only at a dreadful cost.’