Reap the Whirlwind

On a hunch, he ran a full-spectrum search for traces of the Taurus meta-genome and any recognizable sequence from the Shedai carrier wave. Seconds after he started the scan, his tricorder’s display flooded with data. It had detected an enormously complex and powerful energy signature that contained patterns that he realized matched each of the known samples of the meta-genome; it used the carrier wave as a repeating pattern and seemed to come from every direction and everything that he sca

It’s everywhere, he realized. Every plant…the air…the water…the rocks. This pattern’s in every bit of matter on the planet. He made a few adjustments and directed the tricorder’s sensors toward the moon overhead, to analyze its reflected light. It’s even coming from the star itself.

Xiong had no idea what the pattern was, but he knew that it had to be studied. He wondered how much of it he could record on the tricorder’s memory disks. If I dump all its stored data and overwrite my logs about the Tholian ship, I might be able to document a fraction of what I’m reading here.

He wiped the nonessential data from his tricorder and started making a record of the waveform, which he decided to name the Jinoteur Pattern. I’ll probably come home with less than one-tenth of it, he knew, but that’ll be a hundred times more than what we had yesterday.

Shocked by the Apostate’s account of his exile, Theriault asked, “They banished you? For disagreeing with them?”

“Their voices are many, and ours are few,” he said. The Apostate had come ashore much diminished in stature, though he was still a few meters taller than Theriault. Reduced to a less titanic scale, he nonetheless remained impressive. Wrapped in flowing raiment of colored light, he hovered more than a meter above the ground, and his voice continued to resonate and tremble the ground.

She seized upon his choice of words, which she understood implicitly that he had learned from her mind while she had slept in his healing care. “Ours? Others feel as you do?”

“My partisans,” he said. “Standing against more than twice their number, they are only barely outmatched. But we are the victims of a conspiracy of numbers…a tyra

The young science officer gazed upon the impromptu star map with wonder and curiosity. Until today, she had thought that the Federation, with more than one hundred star systems counted as members, was a massive astropolitical entity. Ten thousand star systems, she marveled. It would have constituted a sphere of control greater than all the known Alpha Quadrant and Beta Quadrant political entities combined.

“How could you govern something so vast?” she asked. “The travel times across those distances must have been incredible.”

With the flick of one spectral digit against a mote of light, the Apostate made the glowing speck flare—and at the exact same moment, another mote at the far side of the pond flashed in unison. “Our voice is instantaneous,” he said. He flicked the same mote again, and a different counterpart in a far-removed corner of the cavern pulsed in sympathy. “Our will is done regardless of distance. Form is an illusion; our power resides in our word, and our word is given by our voice.”

Theriault was awestruck. “You’re capable of instant teleportation across distances that great?”

“Only our voice,” said the Apostate. “Only our will. Forms are transitory. We leave them behind.”

Sensing that this was an important detail to clarify, she asked, “You shed your bodies?”

“The subtle body is freed from the crude prison of the corporeal,” the Apostate said—and, as if to underscore his point, his glimmer faded, and his humanoid figure evaporated. Before she could ask if he was still there, a warm billow of air passed by her, and another humanoid figure made of plasticized water ascended from the pond. “Physical forms are shells,” said the Apostate’s liquid avatar, “to be used as needed and then set aside.” His body of water bubbled furiously and erupted into a cloud of mist, which then reassembled itself into the radiant, looming figure it had been only moments before. “Matter exists to serve the will.”

She began to understand. “So…when you move to another world, you let go of whatever body you’re in, and you transmit yourself—just your consciousness.”

“Yes,” the Apostate said in a rare moment of brevity.

“How?”

He turned his gaze upward, toward the opening in the cavern ceiling, then looked back at Theriault. “I will show you.” As he drifted away in a straight path above the pond, a narrow bridge of stone appeared from the water beneath him. “Follow me.”

Theriault cautiously traversed the stone bridge until it reached the center of the pond, directly beneath the opening high overhead. There the bridge ended at a broad circular platform. As soon as she stepped upon it, the bridge behind her sank back under the water. Above her, the Apostate glowed like burnished bronze in sunlight. Transfixed by his beauty, it took Theriault a few seconds to realize that the ceiling of the cavern appeared to be growing closer. Then she looked down and discovered that she was being lifted on a swiftly rising pillar of stone, whose ascent was as gentle as that of an inertia-dampened turbolift. Looking back up at the Apostate, she asked, “You can control this place?”

He replied, “I am this place. This world…is Shedai.”

The platform lifted her into the blinding rays of the sun. She lifted her arm to shield her eyes and squinted into the white glare…and then she saw it: a city. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Long swoops and towering curves defined the architecture. Delicate fluted causeways linked massive, organic-looking structures, like strings of wire uniting cathedral-sized conch shells. Shades of aquamarine and verdigris blended in epic swaths across the façades. Slow streamers of rainbow light danced through the spaces between structures, like earthbound auroras.

A lush valley surrounded the strangely biomechanoid pastel metropolis, and in the distance rolling hills and ragged cliffs bordered the valley. No fewer than six large rivers flowed toward the city, which straddled the valley’s grand basin. The sky was streaked with shredded clouds separated by slashes of hazy daylight stretching from the heavens to the jungle canopy.

“It’s beautiful,” Theriault said, in a voice that felt much too small to praise such a wonder.

A rippling image followed the Apostate’s hand as he swept it across the landscape before her. “Aeons ago, our Colloquium filled this valley. Our voice gave us hegemony.” He directed her attention to a massive dome that topped the highest structure in the city. “Our voice spoke through the First Conduit…our word was law.” The vision of the city’s ancient grandeur faded away, and melancholy mixed with anger infused the Apostate’s tone. “Then came the awakening.”

Fearful of provoking him, Theriault timidly asked, “Awakening of what?”

“Of our voice,” he said. “The revolt of the Kollotuul. It was a rebuke we earned with our hubris.” A sphere of fire encircled her and the Apostate, but the absence of any heat helped Theriault realize it was just another of his illusions. They seemed to be gliding above a rocky surface pitted with volcanic crevices and bubbling pits of sulfur.

“Hundreds of mille