CHAPTER ONE
Revelations
Mercedes Lackey
Some people worshipped her. Most people feared her. Some people hated her.
Few of these people mattered.
She was a seraphim; the Seraphym, as the media were calling her now, some in jest, some in good earnest. It troubled them all that they could not take any sort of picture, no matter what sophisticated equipment they used. The images showed only a brightness, a wash of flame with a slim, vaguely human-shaped brighter space in the midst of it, and the flames spreading out like wings. There was no use in telling them that this was her native form. It would not make them worship or cease to worship, fear or love her any more nor less. This did not matter.
She had killed; one innocent, many guilty. The innocent life troubled her no less than the guilty—but she had removed him from pain at his own request, and that was, in this case, permitted. Her life revolved around what was permitted and what was not. Her life centered on somehow being able to steer the course of the present to a future in which there was a future. There were so many paths in which the instruments of the Fallen had won…and there were some in which there was no world of humans here at all, only charred rubble and the crawling things that could even survive Apocalypse. The Infinite did not wish that. Though the worlds that had been blessed with life that was aware, and alert, and sentient were myriad, the Infinite cherished each and every one. When a sparrow fell, the Infinite mourned: how much more so for a world?
So there it was. This world was in her charge, to steer by imperceptible degrees. Save a life here; let fall a word there. Nor did the instruments matter, only the end.
Thus she found herself, for the moment invisible, hovering in the study of the man called Verdigris.
He was a bad man, an evil man, evil in the way that only the most steeped in evil can be: he was utterly, utterly selfish and self-centered. A sociopath, one might call him, and yet how much of that was due to the atrophy of one little, little part of his brain? Properly stimulated, that part might grow, might learn, might grant him, one day, that thing called a conscience.
But today, this was not her concern. It might never be. Today she was going to use an evil man to steer the future.
She allowed herself to become visible, filling the room with her flaming wings.
Verdigris, she said into his mind, as he looked up, and she felt his surprise, and his surprise at his own surprise, for she was a new thing to him. She was doing what she rarely, rarely did. She was forcing the image she chose of herself into his mind, past his unbelief. He saw her as the frightened little magician had seen her; as the thing that turned the knees to water.
She would not tell him, Fear not. She wanted his fear. She needed his fear.
And he did fear her, but, typically, he refused to show it. That did not matter.
He leaned back in his chair, full of insouciance. “Well,” he said. “This is new. The Vatican taking out a contract on me now?”
It would not matter if they did. Your own methods would foil their mortal attempts, and I am not their creature.
“You interest me.”
I should. You have never seen my like. You may never again. You cannot control me, measure me, persuade me, nor ever understand me.
“You think?”
She did not answer him, or at least, not his challenge. I come to tell you of the Thulians.
He laughed. “I doubt very much you can tell me anything I don’t already know. Unless it’s where their base is or how I can negotiate with them?” He waggled his eyebrows.
There can be no negotiation with them—for you, she said gravely. You are on a list; a handful of people they wish removed from their more perfect world.
He laughed again. “Bunk! There never was anyone I couldn’t negotiate with sooner or la—”
She did not let him finish the sentence. She simply opened the most likely future to him, narrowed in focus down to what his most likely future, at this moment, would be.
Oh, the Thulians wished Verdigris removed from their more perfect world, indeed, but they never, ever wasted anything. Verdigris had a brain, an intellect, the likes of which was unmatched in this world for sheer inventiveness. And for every twenty inventions of his that were of no particular use to them—new flavors of foodstuffs, a seat cushion that could be compressed down to the size of a thimble and uncompressed to memory-foam softness, a way of creating neon signage that took a tenth of the power the same signs took now—there would be one that was something they could use.
So here was the future for Verdigris; the worst future he could possibly imagine.
He would be a brain in a box.
Removed from his body, that body he loved so much and loved to pamper, removed from all physical pleasures, provided with no sensory input but visual and auditory, he would be left with nothing to “play” with except his own tremendous intellect. And they would take the children of his intellect, discard most, and use the rest to further enslave what was already in bondage, taking their rule further out among the stars.
And he would live forever, or nearly so.
She felt his reaction as he did; he could not care for the billions dead, billions enslaved. But he could care—a little—for those he personally knew and to a lesser or greater extent, depended on as they depended on him. He was not altogether a sociopath; there were some connections there, atrophied as they might have been. He prided himself on being able to take care of “his own.” As she slowly unfolded the Thulian progress to him, he watched as they smashed that pride in the dirt, wiped out his empire, and rendered him into an attachment to a computer system, the ultimate AI. And he could not even have the satisfaction of denying them the fruits of his neurons. They had the ability to wrest them away.
The future, for Verdigris, was imprisonment, impotence, and a futile immortality.
Then she shut the future to him. He sat in his chair, no longer insouciant, no longer carefree, and his fear of her and of what he had seen naked on his pale, sweating face. No one had ever seen this expression on his face before.
“That—”
Is a future.
He seized on the article. “A future? So there could be others?” Fear gave way to hope.
It is the most probable. For now.
“But I can change that!”
Any mortal can. If he is in the right place, at the right time, and does the right thing.
“You wouldn’t have come here, shown me that, if you didn’t think I could change it!” He would have seized her by the shoulders and shook her if he had dared. His hands clenched and unclenched on the arms of his chair. “Tell me what to do!” he demanded, in the tones of a man whose demands were always met.
That is not permitted.
That stopped him short, anger blooming in him. “That’s bullshit! Why bother to show this if you won’t tell me how to fix it?”
I answer to a higher power than you. It is not permitted.
He stared at her in outrage. She knew all the things he would have done if he could have. It mattered to her not at all. She knew that in that moment, he had joined the ranks of those who hated her. That, too, mattered not at all.
You know the ending of the journey. Find a way to make another path. Or do not, and find yourself there. I have shown you what is permitted. Go well, and wisely.
And with that, she took herself out of his world. She had done what she could. He was not the only, or even the best, of the choices for those who could make those changes, but he was now one of the most motivated. He would see that future in his nightmares from now on, and he would do everything in his considerable power to prevent it. That he would use any tool went without saying.
But so would she.
The future of this world depended on it.