responsibility. Daley’s response was … refreshing.
He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an epedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Starborn, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No … he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several earlier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them, all intelligence was One … and that included even the Xul. They opposed all war in general, and most especially war based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Commonwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the opponents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy, for just that reason.
Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.
For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth century, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects and. religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestioning obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia and Chryse.
Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create a new species—Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion would die.
Surprisingly, the opposite had happened. Though the older, traditional faiths had been badly shaken, the discoveries on Mars and elsewhere, far from destroying religion, had before long fostered new sects, religions, cults, and philosophies by the dozens, by the hundreds, some of them bizarre in the extreme. Throughout the first half of the new millennium, new faiths had spawned and vied and warred with one another, some accepting the vanished Builders or even the still-extant An or N’mah as gods, creators of Humankind, if not the cosmos. Others—in particular the stricter, more fundamentalist branches of Christianity and Islam—had adhered even more closely to the original texts, and condemned the nonhumans as demons.
Things had stabilized somewhat over the past few centuries. The attack on Earth had killed so many, had so terribly wounded civilization as a whole, that few religions, old or new, could deal with it, save in apocalyptic terms. And when Earth had, after all, survived, when Humankind began to rebuild and the expected second Xul attack had not materialized, many of the more extreme and strident of the sects had at last faded away.
There remained, however, some thousands of religions … but for the most part they fell into one of two major branches of organized spirituality, defined by their attitude toward the Xul. The Transcendents, who represented most of the older faiths plus a number of newer religions emphasizing the nature of the Divine as separate and distinct from Humankind, either ignored the Xul entirely, or associated them with the Devil, enemies of both Man and God.
The Emanists embraced religions and philosophies emphasizing that god arose from within Man, as a metasentient emanation arising from the minds of all humans, or even of all intelligence everywhere in the universe. For them, the Xul were a part of the Divine … or, at the least, His instrument for bringing about the evolution of Humankind. For most Emanists, the key to surviving the Xul was to follow the lead of the An on Ishtar—keep a low profile, roll with the punches, abjure pride and any technological activity that might attract Xul notice. The hope was that, like the Biblical Angel of Death, the Xul would “pass over” humanity once more, as it had before in both recent and ancient history.
While not as widespread as the Transcendents, Emanist religions were popular with large segments of the population on Earth, especially with the Antitechnics and the various Neoprimitive and Back-to-Earth parties. Neognostics like Daley even advocated a complete renunciation of all activities off the surface of the Earth, especially now that the ice was retreating once more.
That was why Alexander—and Devereaux too, evidently—were surprised at his position.
As Alexander closed the e-pedia window, he realized Daley was still speaking, and that he was looking at him as he did so. “Whatever the tenets of my faith might be,” the Neognostic was saying, “Humankind cannot evolve, cannot grow to meet its potential, and can never contribute to the idea we know as God if we as a species become extinct. So long as we remained beneath Xul notice, survival and growth both were possible. But now?” He spread his hands. “I dislike the idea. My whole being rebels against the very idea of war. But … if there is to be war, better it be out there, five hundred light-years away, than here among the worlds of Man.”
“Good God,” General Samuels said in the silence that followed this speech. “I thought it was nuts including a Paxist on the Advisory Council, Ari.” The Paxists included those who believed in peace-at-any-price. “But you’re okay!”
“The Paxists,” Devereaux said sternly, “were invited because they represent the views of a large minority of the Commonwealth population. Very well. General Alexander, thank you for your presentation. The Council will retire now to its private noumenon and vote the question.”
And the Council was gone, leaving Alexander alone in the imaginal room.
If the reaction to Daley’s speech was any indication, though, he would need to begin preparations.
The Marines would be going to war.
0810.1102
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1512/24:20 local time, 0156 hrs GMT
Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed his hands. This was … wonderful. The crisp reality of the sensations coursing through his imaginal body was almost overwhelming.
The hellish empty time was over.
“Pay attention, recruit! This is important!”
Warhurst’s order snapped his attention back to the exercise. He tried to let the feelings flow through his mind, but to keep his focus on the scene around him.
The landscape was barren and unforgivingly rugged, a volcanic mountain of black rock and sand cratered and torn by a devastating firestorm and draped in drifting patches of smoke. He was standing in the middle of a battle … an ancient battle, one with unarmored men carrying primitive firearms as they struggled up the mountain’s flank. Gunfire thundered—not the hiss and crack of lasers and plasma weapons, but the deeper-throated boom and rattle of slug-throwers, punctuated moment to moment by the heavy thud of high explosives.
Something—a fragment of high-velocity metal—whined past his ear, the illusion so realistic he flinched. He reminded himself that he had nothing to fear, however. This panorama of blood, confusion, and noise was being downloaded into his consciousness from
