Prophets

itself. It was obviously an artifact, not a meteor. The surface was way too smooth. It was also small, much smaller than it had appeared when Flynn saw its descent.

It was egg-shaped, and from what he could see of it, he’d guess that its long axis would be two or three meters long, four at the most. Small enough that Flynn had initially lost sight of it in the devastation caused by the impact.

He raised the camera to it and zoomed in . . .

“What the . . . ?”

At first he thought the calibration was blown on his equipment, but several spectrum and configuration changes gave him the same picture. The mud and ash around the egg was boiling hot, averaging over a hundred degrees, and hot spots all around five or six times that.

The egg itself was cold. It radiated no heat at all.

Radiated nothing.

Flynn’s equipment picked nothing radiating or reflecting from the matte-black surface. No infrared, ultraviolet, or visible light. The laser and radar range finders couldn’t fix on the thing; when he swept the beam past it, he saw the numbers go from 268.25 meters to infinity.

Flynn shook his head, “It’s a black hole.”

“No,” Tetsami said, still standing next to him, “It’s something a lot more complicated.”

Flynn looked at her. “You know what this is?”

Tetsami nodded. “Yes.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. It quavered a bit, and for a moment Flynn saw his several-greats grandmother as a little girl. “Eigne called it a seed.”

Eigne called it a seed.

In the seventeen years Tetsami had been part of him, Flynn had learned a lot about her history. History that, not too surprisingly, was not part of the normal educational curriculum on Salmagundi—not that there was much of a curriculum to begin with. The schooling Flynn had gotten was pretty much limited to the basics of literacy, linguistic and otherwise. Their ancestors had done all the heavy lifting on those points, so what was the point of teaching history?

So over the years, he had heard a lot from Tetsami that no one else had ever bothered to tell him. The details of the founding of Salmagundi weren’t the only things she had told him about. Eigne and the Proteans were another part of that secret history.

Tetsami, as had most of the Founders, had come from the planet Bakunin as the Terran Confederacy was collapsing. Bakunin was a lawless world that respected no human State, and because of that attracted every form of deviant belief, every persecuted form of worship, every refugee from anywhere.

Every one.

The Founders of Salmagundi, free of the Confederacy’s constraints on heretical technologies, built the infrastructure that would become the Hall of Minds, something that would be anathema to the men who declared the operation of an AI a capital crime. Compared to the Proteans, the sins committed by the Founders of Salmagundi were insignificant. There were other heresies, graver sins.

Before the stars were in easy reach, man had tried to terraform the worlds in his home system using molecule- sized self-replicating intelligent machines. However, something had gone wrong on a distant moon, Titan. The machines took over, and the war that followed sterilized all of man’s outposts in the outer part of humanity’s home system. A billion people died in that war, five million in the immediate aftermath, others in subsequent efforts to sterilize the sites of banned nanotech experiments, including one long-dead planet where the Confederacy killed nearly fifty million people by dropping a hundred-kilometer asteroid through the planet’s crust.

But those who dealt with such things had never been completely wiped out. A small sect of human beings—at least a sect of people who had once been human—equated spiritual transcendence with the physical and mental transformations granted by the machines. The cult of Proteus found refuge, if not a home, on Bakunin. And the entity that had spoken for the Proteans on Bakunin had called herself Eigne.

Before the Confederacy, in its death throes, used an orbital linear accelerator to vaporize the Protean outpost on Bakunin, that outpost had manufactured and launched thousands of seeds. Seeds that contained millions of minds archived from eras back as far as the catastrophe on Titan, as well as the entire collected sum of human knowledge up to that point in human history.

In large part, the reason for the existence of the Proteans was to propagate their existence as far as possible in space and time.

One of those seeds had just crashed here, on Salmagundi.