“Then why did I do it to her, rather than you? Why didn’t I do it to Mandella when he came within an inch of killing me?”
“Maybe you crave excitement,” I said. “I’ve met people like that. You want the two of us to live, to make your world more interesting.”
“It’s interesting enough, thank you.” He cocked his head. “And about to become more so.”
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book six
THE BOOK OF REVELATION
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Chapter thirty-one
I heard it then, the faint warbling sound of two floaters converging from different directions. In a few seconds they were visible; in a few more, they floated over us and settled down in the park.
They were sport floaters, bright orange and cherry, streamlined like the combat helicopters of my youth–“Cobras,” and they did look like cobras.
The cockpit canopies slid back and a man and a woman climbed out. They were both a little too large, like our pal, and the floaters rocked in gratitude, relieved of their weight.
Both the man and the woman shrank when they saw us. But they left deep footprints in the grass. I wondered why they hadn’t just come as floaters. Maybe that took too much material.
The woman was black and stocky, and the man was white and so plain it would be hard to describe his face.
Protective coloration, I supposed; a kind of default configuration. They were both wearing togas of natural unbleached cloth.
There was no greeting. The three Omni looked at each other, conversing silently, for less than a minute.
The woman spoke. “There will be more of us here soon. We are dying too, in violence, the way your friend died.”
“The nameless?” I asked.
“What can you say about the nameless?” the man said. “I think it is them, because things are happening contrary to physical law.”
“They’re in control of physics?”
“Apparently,” our priest said. “People exploding, antimatter evaporating. Ten billion creatures going off to, as you say, some cosmic nudist colony. Or mass grave.”
“I’m afraid it is a grave,” the woman said. “And we’re about to join them.”
All three of them looked at me. The faceless man spoke. “You did it. You tried to leave the Galaxy. Escape the preserve the nameless established for us.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’ve left the Galaxy before. The Sade-138 campaign was in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other campaigns were in the Lesser Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf.”
“Collapsar travel is not the same,” the woman said. “Wormholes. It’s like exchanging one quantum state for another, and then going back.”
“Like a bungee jump,” our fan of the twentieth century added.
“With your starship,” she continued, “you were actually leaving. You were going into the territory of the nameless.”
“They told you this?” Marygay asked. “You talk to the nameless?”
“No,” the man said. “It’s just inference.”
“You would call it Occam’s Razor,” the woman said. “It’s the least complicated explanation.”
“So we’ve provoked the wrath of God,” I said.
“If you want to put it that way,” the plain one said. “What we’re trying to figure out is how to get God’s attention.”
I wanted to scream, but Sara expressed it more calmly. “If they’re omnipotent and everywhere…we have their attention. Too much of it.”
The priest shook his head. “No. It’s sporadic. The nameless leave us alone for weeks, for years. Then they introduce a variable, like a scientist or a curious child would, and watch how we react.”
“Getting rid of everybody?” Marygay said. “That’s a variable?”
“No,” the black woman said. “I think it means the experiment is over. The nameless are cleaning up.”
“And what we have to do,” the plain man said, and paused. “Now me.” He exploded, but not into blood and guts and fragments of bone. It was a shower of white particles, a small blizzard. The particles settled to the ground and disappeared.
“Hell,” the priest said. “I liked him.”
“What we have to do,” the woman continued for him, “is get the attention of the nameless and convince them to leave us alone.”
“And you two,” the priest said to me and Marygay, “are the obvious key. You provoked them.”