“Will this version work in the beyond?” Samual asked sharply.
“I doubt it would ever get through to the beyond,” Mattox said. “At present, it’s too slow and inefficient. It managed to dissipate Junior’s thought processes; but as you saw, it didn’t get all the memories. The areas of the mind which are not employed when the anti-memory strikes are likely to be insulated from it as the thought channels which would ordinarily connect them are nullified. If you analogise the mind with a city, you’re destroying the roads and leaving the buildings intact. Given that the connection a possessing soul has with the beyond is tenuous at best, there is no guarantee the anti-memory would manage to pass through in its current form. We must develop a much faster version.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“No sir. These are estimations and theories. We won’t know if a version works until after it’s proved successful.”
“The trouble with that is, a successful anti-memory would exterminate every soul in the beyond,” Euru said quietly.
“Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” Gilmore said. “That’s our dilemma. There can be no small scale test or demonstration. Anti- memory is effectively a doomsday weapon.”
“You’ll never get the souls to believe that,” Lalwani said. “In fact, given what we know of conditions in the beyond, you wouldn’t even get many of them to pay attention to the warning.”
“I cannot conceivably permit the use of a weapon which will exterminate billions of human entities,” the First Admiral said. “You have to provide me with alternative options.”
“But Admiral—”
“No. I’m sorry, Doctor. I know you’ve worked hard on this, and I appreciate the effort you and your team have made. Nobody is more aware than myself of just how extreme the threat which the possessed present. But even that cannot justify such a response.”
“Admiral! We’ve explored every option we can think of. Every theorist I’ve got in every scientific discipline there is has been working on ideas and wild theories. We even tried an exorcism after that priest on Lalonde claimed his worked. Nothing.
“Doctor, I’m not denigrating your work or your commitment. But surely you can see this is completely unacceptable. Morally, ethically, it is wrong. It cannot be anything other than wrong. What you are suggesting is racial genocide. I will tell you this, the authorization to use such a monstrosity will never come from my lips. Nor I suspect, and hope, would any other Navy officer issue it. Now find me another solution. This project is terminated.”
The First Admiral’s staff ran a quiet sweepstake to see how long it would be before President Haaker datavised for a conference, the winner called it in at ninety-seven minutes. They sat facing each other across the oval table in a security-level-one sensenviron bubble room. Both kept their generated faces neutral and intonations level.
“Samual, you can’t cancel the anti-memory project,” the President opened with. “It’s all we’ve got.”
In his office, Samual Aleksandrovich smiled at the way Haaker used his first name, the man always did that when he was going to adopt a totally intransigent line. “Apart from the Mortonridge Liberation, you mean?” He could imagine the tight lips drawn at that jibe.
“As you so kindly pointed out earlier, the Liberation is not a solution to the overall problem. Anti-memory is.”
“Undoubtedly. Too final. Look, I don’t know if Mae and Jeeta explained this fully to you, but the research team believe it would exterminate every soul in the beyond. You can’t seriously consider that.”
“Samual, those souls you’re so concerned about are attempting to enslave every one of us. I have to say I’m surprised by your attitude. You’re a military man, you know that war is the result of total irrationality combined with conflict of interest. This crisis is the supreme example of both. The souls desperately want to return, and we cannot allow them to. They will extinguish the human race if they succeed.”
“They will ruin almost everything we have accomplished. But total life extinction, no. I don’t even believe they can possess all of us. The Edenists have proved remarkably resistant; and the spread has all but stopped.”
“Yes, thanks to your quarantine. It’s been a successful policy, I won’t deny that. But so far we’ve been unable to offer anything that can reverse what’s happened. And that’s what the vast majority of the Confederation population want. Actually, that’s what they insist upon. The spread might have slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. You know that as well as I do. And the quarantine is difficult to enforce.”
“You really don’t understand what you’re proposing, do you. There are billions of souls there. Billions.”
“And they are living in torment. For whatever reason, they cannot move on as this Laton character claimed is possible. Don’t you think they’d welcome true death?”
“Some of them might. I probably would. But neither you nor I have the right to decide that for them.”
“They forced us into this position. They’re the ones invading us.”
“That does not give us the right to exterminate them. We have to find a way to help them; by doing that we help ourselves. Can you not see that?”
The President abandoned his image’s impartiality and leant forwards, his voice becoming earnest. “Of course I can see that. Don’t try to portray me as some kind of intransigent villain here. I’ve supported you, Samual, because I know nobody can command the Navy better than you. And I’ve been rewarded by that support. So far we’ve kept on top of the political situation, kept the hotheads in line. But it can’t last forever. Sometime, somehow, a solution is going to have to be presented to the Confederation as a whole. And all we’ve got so far is one solitary possible answer: the anti-memory. I cannot permit you to abandon that, Samual. These are very desperate times; we have to consider everything, however horrific it appears.”
“I will never permit such a thing to be used. For all they are different, the souls are human. I am sworn to protect life throughout the Confederation.”
“The order to use it would not be yours to give. A weapon like that never falls within the prerogative of the military. It belongs to us, the politicians you despise.”
“Disapprove of. Occasionally.” The First Admiral permitted a slight smile to show.
“Keep on searching, Samual. Bully Gilmore and his people into finding a decent solution, a humanitarian one. I want that as much as you do. But they are to continue to develop the anti-memory in parallel.”
There was a pause. Samual knew that to refuse now would mean Haaker issuing an official request through his office. Which in turn would make his position as First Admiral untenable. That was the stark choice on offer.
“Of course, Mr President.”
President Haaker gave a tight smile, and datavised his processor to cancel the meeting, safe in the knowledge that their oh-so diplomatic clash would be known to no one.
The encryption techniques which provided a security-level-one conference were, after all, known to be unbreakable. The most common statistic quoted by security experts was that every AI in the Confederation running in parallel would be unable to crack the code in less than five times the life of the universe. It would, therefore, have proved quite distressing to the CNIS secure communications division (as well as their ESA and B7 equivalents, among others) to know that a perfect replica of a 27-inch 1980’s Sony Trinitron colour television was currently showing the image of the First Admiral and the Assembly President to an audience of fifteen attentive duomillenarians and one highly inattentive ten-year-old girl.
Tracy Dean sighed in frustration as the picture vanished to a tiny phosphor dot in the middle of the screen. “Well, that’s gone and put the cat amongst the pigeons, and no mistake.”
Jay was swinging her feet about while she sat on a too-high stool. As well as being their main social centre, the clubhouse catered for the retired Kiint observers who weren’t quite up to living by themselves in a chalet anymore. A huge airy building, with wide corridors and broad archways opening into sunlit rooms that all seemed to resemble hotel lounges. The walls were white plaster, with dark-red tile floors laid everywhere. Big clay pots growing tall palms were a favourite. Tiny birds with bright gold and scarlet bodies and turquoise membrane wings
