Diana should have felt grateful, even honored. Instead she felt used.
So she set out to find who or what had been using her, and why, only to run into a brick wall. The Mater Mundi apparently didn't want her true nature known, and had gone to great lengths to cover her tracks. There were rumors and gossip aplenty, but nothing at all in the way of hard facts, no matter how deep she dug. It was taken as a matter of faith that the Mater Mundi had founded the esper underground, somewhen in the distant past, and then retreated into the shadows to watch and guide from a distance. But there was no record anywhere of anyone who had personally witnessed any of this, or knew anyone who had.
The one thing that was clear was that people who went looking for the Mater Mundi tended not to come back. People who asked too many questions disappeared. Eventually the underground declared her officially off limits, a mystery too dangerous to be investigated. Diana didn't give a damn. In her experience, people who stayed in hiding usually had a good reason for doing so, and she wanted to know what it was. Why the God of espers hid from her worshipers. And why she thought she could just use and discard people, and not answer for it.
Diana decided that if anyone knew anything, it had to be the esper underground's records. So she walked into the esper Guild House in the Parade of the Endless, took over its records section, and basically defied anyone to do anything about it.
At first Diana got nowhere fast. There were all kinds of blocks and passwords, secret files within files, and double encryptions that she had no experience of. The esper Guild protected its secrets well, even from its own. Perhaps particularly from its own. But Diana had planned ahead, cultivating useful friendships among the cyberats, who just saw the Guild's blocking tactics as a challenge. Diana watched and learned at a rate that astonished herself. The Mater Mundi might have abandoned her, but it had left her much more than she had been. Soon she no longer needed the cyberats' help, and dug steadily deeper into the past in pursuit of an enigmatic ghost.
She discovered a great many hidden truths about the early days of the underground, when the espers had been still struggling to put it together. There were files on secret deals and unpalatable agreements, of good men sacrificed for the greater good. Of conflicting organizations savagely crushed so that the underground could represent all espers. Past heroes were revealed to have feet of clay, and past villains emerged as simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with too many inconvenient scruples. As in so many organizations that have been around for a while, the winners wrote the history, and truth was sacrificed on the altar of necessity.
Diana wasn't really surprised. But dig as deep as she might, the Mater Mundi remained elusive, flickering around the edges of the underground, touching this person or that, guiding the underground's progress with a subtle nudge here and an unobtrusive prod there. The pattern was clear when you stood far enough back, and Diana couldn't believe she was the first person to have done so, but there were no records anywhere, no solid facts worthy of the name, no official files of any kind on the Mater Mundi.
If the truth was there, they'd buried it deep, where maybe even the current leaders couldn't find it anymore. Something had frightened them. And given some of the things the underground did still maintain in the records, whatever they had found out about Our Mother of All Souls must have been pretty damn unpleasant. Or dangerous.
Espers had been first created through genetic engineering just under three centuries ago. A happy accident, the unexpected result of experiments intended to produce something else entirely. It took some time to stabilize the process so that specific abilities would breed true; as telepaths, pokers, pyros etc. After that it was just a question of establishing quality control, so the end result could be successfully marketed. Espers weren't human. They were property, like clones. The end result of Empire science.
No one objected. Or at least no one that mattered.
Once the esper underground was founded, sometime later, its leaders tried many paths, some more successful than others. One of their more disturbing notions had been their attempt to secretly gengineer existing espers into some form of super-esper that could be used as weapons in the great struggle. Espers capable of wielding more than one ability, or even manifesting new, undreamed-of powers. Espers who would burn so brightly they could outshine the sun. There were objectors, but they were shouted down. This was war, after all.
At first there was no shortage of volunteers, but these quickly tailed off as it became clear the end results were almost entirely negative. The scientists couldn't produce super-espers. Only monsters, physical and mental, horrible beyond bearing. The underground destroyed all they could, and did something else with the others. No one knew what. The files were hidden away where no one could find them. Until Diana came along. Little solid evidence remained of what the esper scientists had created in their hidden laboratories, just a list of names. The Shatter Freak, Blue Hellfire, Screaming Silence, The Gray Train, The Spider Harps. And one final name, attached to a date so old it predated the esper underground by centuries. A familiar name.
Deathstalker.
Diana still wasn't sure what to make of that. She'd tried cautiously raising the subject with Owen, but he just sat there for a while, looking very thoughtful, and then clammed up entirely. She tried reason, and threats, but neither of them got her anywhere. Even Jenny Psycho didn't have what it took to pressure Owen Deathstalker.
Diana scowled. The Maze people worried her. Human beings shouldn't be able to do the things these people did so casually. And all the signs were that they were still growing stronger, with no clear end in sight. Perhaps in time they might become something like the Mater Mundi—certainly they were all a long way down the road to leaving humanity behind.
Diana had talked to them all, at one time or another, about the Madness Maze, but they didn't have much to say. The one thing they did agree on was that the Maze was gone, destroyed by her father, Captain Silence. So Diana went to him for answers, half convinced by then that the Mater Mundi might have been someone who'd passed through the Madness Maze centuries earlier. The same double initial might even be some kind of clue. But Silence couldn't tell her much either, except to say he'd only gone partway through the Maze before retreating. He was developing strange abilities himself, but wouldn't discuss them. He did say he'd seen the Maze kill many members of his crew who'd entered the Maze with him, in hideous, nightmarish ways.
The Madness Maze took a few ordinary men and women and made them superhuman. But it killed a hell of a lot more.
Diana never asked her father why he destroyed the Maze. If he did it because he believed its existence threatened all Humanity, or to deny it to the rebels, or just because it had killed so many of his crew. She was pretty sure he wouldn't have been able to answer her.
Diana had been forced to abandon that particular line of inquiry for the moment, since all the Maze survivors had left Golgotha. But she had a strong feeling the Mater Mundi wasn't directly linked to the Madness Maze, after all. Whatever else it was, Our Mother of All Souls was very definitely an esper phenomenon, and the Maze people… weren't. And whatever they were becoming, Diana had a suspicion the end result wouldn't necessarily be anything even remotely human.
She pushed the thought aside. Sufficient unto the day the evils thereof. Or something like that.
Just recently she'd been concentrating on the file histories of earlier manifests of the Mater Mundi. Their names were well known, but the hard facts concerning their… possession… had been well hidden. There were remarkably few of them, only eight in total in over two hundred years. As people they had nothing in common save one disturbing fact—none of them had survived the Mater Mundi's touch. They'd all gone crazy, and after carrying out the uber-esper's wishes, they'd burned up from within, consumed by the power that raged within them. There hadn't even been enough left of them to bury. It was as though their merely human minds simply couldn't handle the vast energies the Mater Mundi had let loose in them.
Diana went cold the first time she read that. She could have died. Everybody else had. The Mater Mundi must have had every reason to expect her to run mad and die, but had used her anyway. She had no way of knowing that Diana Vertue, then almost wholly Jenny Psycho, would be the first avatar to survive her amplifying touch. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Diana was already more than a little crazy when the Mater Mundi found and used her in Wormboy Hell. Which suggested something very disturbing about the state or nature of the Mater Mundi herself.
Could that be the answer? That the uber-esper's actions made no obvious sense because she or it was quite
