Solovyov continued. “That mentality is what interests me about you, Mr. Barrett. It’s something I believe we have in common. A capacity for empathy while engaged in cruel, yet necessary action. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”
He paused, as if searching for the right words. “I know you’re an educated man—exceptional marks, top 90th percentile of your class. Top 95th percentile at the Arbiter Academy. Tell me, what do you know of the Eight Year War?”
It was an odd change of subject, but I humored him. “The same as anyone else,” I answered. “It was a global war with the highest death toll of any conflict in human history.”
I was listening to the old man, but I was watching Katerina. I suspected the reason he was so forthcoming was to get me to drop my guard. I had no doubt that if my attention wandered, Katerina would make her move. It wasn’t very different from our first encounter, only this time the third party was in league with her instead of me. Solovyov looked too frail to help her in any physical sense, but there was no way to know what electronic systems he could command. From a unit of combat proxies to a fleet of drones, anything was possible when money was no object.
Soloyvov nodded. “The war began with overpopulation, dwindling access to water, and economic collapse. How did it end?”
“There was no winner,” I said. “The Thanatos Impact stopped the war.”
Solovyov closed his eyes and nodded again. “On the night of June 9, 2088, object K87P12K struck the Earth. Hot ash rained on us as we watched the sky burn. The wall of fire stretched across the entire horizon and pierced the clouds.”
I understood the implication of what he was saying, hard as it was to accept. “The portraits in the foyer. The boy.”
“Yes. Some eight hundred years ago, crawling through the ruins of a city already ravaged by famine and destroyed by war. When the sky blackened and the year of night began, thousands died from starvation. As I would have, had I lacked the strength of will to do what was necessary.”
Solovyov arched his back and spread his arms. He floated on the water as lightly as a fallen leaf. Even in Callisto’s gravity, it looked wrong, like he was just a hollow shell.
“Drinking water was a matter of desalination,” he continued. “Simple enough for a child, but food had been scarce for years before the night. It was only on the edge of starvation that I realized my mistake. The bodies of the dead were everywhere, you see. Imagine that. Weeks of food there for the taking while all around people died of hunger. I quickly learned the proper way to butcher a corpse, how best to cleave the meat to reduce waste. What to eat and what to discard. And when the supply on-hand turned, there was always more to be found. All it took was a change of perspective to transform a problem into a solution.”
From the portrait, I would have guessed he was no more than fourteen years old then.
“Tell me, Mr. Barrett, what does history teach of the years following the Thanatos Impact?”
“That it began the Humanist Age,” I replied, trying to connect the strand of logic. “It led to mankind working together on an unprecedented scale. Is that your point? That tragedy unites people? Is that why Marcenn caused 2/77?”
“No, Mr. Barrett.” Solovyov laughed, a rasping, choking sound that made the synthesized quality of his voice even more inhuman. “August Marcenn wanted to stop our great work by becoming what we are. His reasoning was sound. Our absence would be a void that would collapse the solar system, but if he could supplant us, he could undo our efforts in time. The error was in his execution, though his end was already assured from the—”
A fit of coughing overcame him, and he made a deliberate effort to stifle it. He took another deep breath, then continued.
“I digress. The obvious conclusion after Thanatos was to settle the cosmos. Not in half-measures on Luna but with permanent, sustainable colonies across the solar system. Yet this inarguable truth was met with resistance. Some believed humanity’s efforts should instead focus entirely on terran affairs. Though willing to acknowledge the danger posed by another impact event, they believed observatories and deep space imaging would be enough. That another Eight Year War could never happen again. Hardly a plurality, and yet these individuals were enough to prove detrimental.”
His voice was bitter, as if those events from so many centuries ago had happened just yesterday. Julian Huxley had said he could no longer clearly remember events from the distant past. That they felt as if they had happened to a different person entirely. Clearly Ivan Solovyov was a different sort of man.
“The year of night ended, and before long the new war began,” he said wearily. “I studied philosophy, religion, biology, anything that might give me some insight into what had happened. Why it had happened. The conclusion I reached then still holds true today. Simply, that when given the freedom to choose, many will invariably choose poorly.”
I’d heard that same sentiment from other narcissists. “You’re saying you know what’s best for people more than they do.”
“Precisely. Yet even knowing this, some sought their own destruction rather than accept that simple truth. They acted, not out of reason, but out of emotion.”
“Some people hate to be told what to do.”
“Yes, unfortunately,” replied Solovyov. “It wasn’t until nearly the end of my first life that I devised a solution to that problem. I simply needed to change my perspective. I had to recognize that contrarians will always rise to oppose the currents of history, but that opposition can be controlled. The effects of resistance ameliorated.”
It was a strategy Federation Intelligence occasionally used. Placing loyal assets in leadership roles within insurgent groups had allowed the Sol Federation to dismantle the Medina rebellion from the inside without firing a shot. Gradually shifting a group’s values over time was enough to make people think the idea was theirs from the start, even if it was the antithesis of what they originally stood for. Solovyov was implying the Eleven had done this on an interplanetary scale for nearly a thousand years.
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
He was silent for a moment, but his mouth opened and closed like he was trying to say something. Katerina knelt to check the devices at his temples. The old man inhaled sharply and blinked. His eyes darted around the room before fixing on me once again.
“What’s wrong with him,” I asked Katerina.
“He’s dying,” she answered plainly. “I’m sure the experience is very unpleasant. A proper Warwick node would have been ideal, but this is an old process and there are ways to improvise.”
“You’re saying that this is—”
“Yes. Very few people ever witness a Continuity event, Tycho. You should be honored.”
If this pool was part of a Warwick node, then there was another somewhere with a person in it. Someone I could save. I started toward the door at the far end of the room. Katerina put up a hand to stop me.
“It’s too late to stop it, Tycho. If you try to go in there, we’d just have to fight again. I’d kill you, and you would have only delayed me from giving Solovyov the help he needs.”
The old man had been relaxed as he floated in the water, but there had been a passive tension as he held his head level. Now he was dead weight, his face turned and half-submerged. He’d stopped breathing, his body still except for the slight motion on the water’s surface.