The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 111: Not Tonight
Quite clearly, Trust had been reset, and the players-drawing on some twenty years of accumulated experience-had managed, whether through the magic of balanced game design or simply because such is human nature, to reproduce more or less the same world.
This time there was no Stella Nori, and no deadline: Cassandre had wrapped herself in her true name and had taken the time to visit the wonders and the horrors of Trust. Drawing on her previous experience, she had been able to modify the Dark Unit so as to dive into it without Armor, and above all to completely disconnect from the software load of the After when she rested: thus, she could endure for weeks where only days before had drained her of all strength.
Enriched by this extra time, she had danced with the cat-men of the sinister carnival of the Spectral Celephaïs, learned from a guild how to hunt and tame her own dragon, and on its back reached sky islands where libraries stood, filled with unknown books, never read, generated on the fly by AI. There she had read a particularly beautiful sentence about the color of the sky, and she thought melancholically that she alone, in the whole history of humanity, would ever know that sentence: if she never revealed it to anyone, she would carry that information with her, like the memory of a beautiful landscape, into the heart of the Empyrean ... before remembering that all of humanity would live its life second by second in Pax ... the process is underway. Nothing will truly belong to us anymore, not even a thought.
Then rose the towers crowned with bulbous domes of the Fief of Joy. Her dragon skimmed above the exotic long-necked animals and their owners, who were fiercely negotiating this plot of land or that high-bandwidth connection. For a moment, the dragon eclipsed the setting sun in the palace windows before crashing awkwardly onto the flight of steps before the great sculpted double door. Two equally awkward guards-AIs-helped her to her feet with repeated cries of “Lady Cassandre.”
Lady Cassandre ignored them, pushed the two doors open from their center, and entered sumptuous corridors. The tapestries depicting ships now told the epic of Lord Lucky, who had crossed parallel worlds and led all Chimera sapiens to Hyperion in order, it seemed, to save all of humanity.
Thoughtfully, Cassandre admired the white-and-gold woven scene of the Great Traveler conversing with the Wau in the base of the Church of Quantum Survivance. She was surprised by the arrival of a familiar and yet fleeting figure from her own story: Euyin, stepping through the banquet hall curtain, hat on his head and a smile on his lips.
- “Oh,” he said, as if struck by a wonderful surprise, “Lady Stella-or Cassandre. The one who asked me on a Tuesday where Julia Prahi was, and who on Sunday won Trust. And the one who told me she would one day return to the After to tell me everything. You hadn’t lied, in the end.”
- “Cassandre,” she confirmed, shaking his hand.
- “Cassandre,” he said, removing his hat, “you are family now. If you ever need me, my services will be free.”
- “And I am no longer in a hurry. I think I indirectly owe you my life. Perhaps it is time to keep my promise.”
Smiling, he invited her to sit on the benches of the antechamber to the banquet hall. Their words rang out loudly, but were ignored by the AIs who already, somewhere, knew everything.
Cassandre expounded at length on the fate of most of the actors in what was called in the HS “the Aleph Crisis,” though its stakes intersected with the very destiny of all sentient civilizations in the universe.
Aleph was tried once again, in a sprawling trial that divided the HS, as he had a great many followers. The Transients, who had abandoned the universe, could not interfere in the proceedings. But as the first time, he accepted his fate graciously, facilitating the process. He was sentenced to virtualization therapy, and everyone knew that sooner or later, one would encounter him in the After.
“But if we are to believe the Heir of humanity, he will have become a completely good man-a path on which, I believe, he already was-and from the After he will accomplish many beneficent deeds for humanity.”
If the conduct of the HS as a whole-its leaders, the Stellar Fleet, and the press-had been more than questionable during the Aleph Crisis and meticulously documented by the AIs, the account given by influential figures was entirely different. Ingo Izan emotionally hammered home tales of terror and resistance against a creature, Aleph, possessed by a malevolent Transient, and all of humanity found itself united in the belief that it had created a glorious, omnipresent Resistance that had triumphed over divine plans. It was false, but it is so tiring to verify sources when it is so pleasant to be enchanted by a great storyteller who turns everyone into a hero...
Through the prism of this great lie, Cassandre measured how rarely humanity had behaved well, and how it had painted over each of its moral defeats.
“We are idiots lost in our vices, draped in a king’s cloak.”
Andreï was buried with honors on Yarn Ball, and Tohil posthumously awarded him a medal whose name Cassandre had not noted. His crew wept, except for Pallas, and the speech did not pay him tribute, given the divergence between reality and the needs of the post-crisis unifying narrative. For the HS and the Stellar Fleet, Andreï would simply be the man who had discovered a Transient system at the far end of the universe.
“Unjust, but exactly what he would have wanted.”
Ada, confronted with this narrative, was filled with great fury and considered descending upon Prospero to kill people at random. The Wau intervened in time to reason with her, and at the end of a long dialogue that lasted two days and two nights, convinced Ada to undergo AI therapy. It produced apparently wonderful effects, and it was a capable and serene young woman who emerged from the suit, full of dreams of adventure and thirst for knowledge. Only in appearance, noted the Wau, who could read minds, and he devised another plan: he asked the young woman to “pretend” she had changed for a few years.
Thus Ada divided her time between journeys to habitable Xeno planets identified by Andreï with Salman (and all the love she could find with him), and mathematical research at UniNox, where she demonstrated that an alert and imaginative mind can be as perceptive as the brutal sweeping of AIs. Nourished by love, science, and wonder, she healed-and if she is still called Gorylkin, and if she still carries her Transient rifle, well, the page of violence seems to have been turned. Perhaps also thanks to the presence of Alpha and Kukth, who love her in a Xeno way that only she can understand.
“Despite her maturity, she remains haunted by her past deeds. I watch over her, so that in the tribunal of her conscience I may intervene and plead in her favor.”
Salman was unquestionably the darling of the authorities in the post-crisis unfolding of events. “Calmos,” already a useful symbol of an army that wished to appear benevolent, had forged a Human–Xeno alliance-moreover, a military one. He was integrated into the government, in second position after the HS minister for Xeno affairs, with a permanent office in the renovated tower of Origin. There he simply understood that for years, Xeno affairs had consisted above all in not interfering with incomprehensible civilizations. The unofficial philosophy of the ministry revolved around the fable of a dinner between a human and a Xeno, with the principle of “never asking the time of the meal.” Salman took part in long meetings where he explained what he had learned about the Xenos, and the experts nodded with conviction-but nothing changed.
So Salman resigned, and the President of the HS, fearing he might depart to some Xeno world to found an alliance, refused his resignation. Then Salman stole a Tyger on Origin and “disappeared,” except to his friends. He is today humanity’s representative in the Xeno alliance, but no one in the HS truly knows it. His secret project, he confided one day to the Wau, was in the coming months to seed Dante’s soil with Xeno seeds to transform the prison into a paradise. His best friend is the Abandoned One, who developed a deeply human, boundless friendship for the former soldier and follows him everywhere. The Abandoned One has become a major figure in the Xeno alliance, and many believe that if the Xenos had a leader-at least in the local galactic cluster-it would be him.
“Of all the marvelous flowers that will bloom on Dante, Salman is the first.”
Sky became a billionaire in fifteen days. The Hyperion project, underway for years, suddenly required massive inputs of fractal materials, and the Endymions had vanished from the stellar routes. He organized smuggling, cheated his associates, and siphoned colossal sums from army funds. He is now extremely rich, equipped with a new hand, but pursued by nearly everyone-authorities and cartels alike.
“On good days, he considers uploading himself into the After and abandoning his billions. On bad days ... let’s not talk about it.”
Samuel Aloysius was executed on Lodovico by Aleph’s troops when the army lost control of the Chimera Sapiens. Worse still, he is portrayed by the Ingo Izan as the scientific genius and damned soul of the malevolent Transient-and many consider him worse than Aleph himself. Ada, who is making breakthroughs regarding the Veritatis, intends to rehabilitate his image, though no one really knows to what end, since he is not even in the After.
“Samuel was my friend. And I am responsible for his death. I do not know how I will be able to process this information in the years to come.”
Pallas suffered greatly from the resolution of the Aleph Crisis. Very attached to Andreï, she replayed all their many years together, listing everything she might have done to find a solution. She left society and plunged body and soul into the Grip. The Wau found her during a blood-soaked orgy of the cult in the True Abyss, and kidnapped her to undertake a long journey of philosophical discourse and discoveries. The psi officer joined the Cult of the Epic of All Life and completed all the required pilgrimages; she found peace. She now commands the Alecto with Andreï’s former crew. Tohil entrusted them with a mission of exploration and first contact with the Xenos of Multitude.