The word abnormality falls far short of a true description for what I find when I arrive, but I am no longer in any doubt as to what it is. Since I last saw it, it has grown into a monstrous collage of human body parts, compressed, stretched, and twisted into a single hurting nightmare.
The Consortium royal gardens—the place where I spent so much of my time when I first arrived at the Soul Consortium—has been choked by Keitus Vieta’s abominable sculpture of life. Had Plantagenet Soome not shot the fetus within the walls of the genoplant on Castor’s World, this is the poor creature it would have eventually grown into. But Keitus waited and began again, and here is the result.
I step slowly through the archway, wincing at the multitude of agonized moans, glancing between the suffering faces, clawed hands, and warped spines, all fused together as though some maniacal god squeezed a world of people into one impossible body, then stretched it out like a fleshy blanket across the land. The trees that once graced this place have been stripped of life, every branch and root clogged by bloody veins. Bark and stem smeared with pulsing organs and sticky pulp.
A thousand lidless eyes follow me as I continue on toward the glowing center drawn by a macabre curiosity but repulsed by the fetid stench and morbid horror. Cavernous mouths gargle their pain in tortured unison, and from the grass and earth, fingers with too many joints fumble to grasp at my feet as my soles crunch onward. I keep walking, numb with shock, willing myself with every last atom of resolve to see the core of it all. And at last I find it—the indigo glare of energy surrounded by wet tubes and slippery fibers.
Distant memories of Dominique Mancini’s visit to Keitus’s house in Lombardy remind me of the ugly statues he kept there. He called it a creative outlet, the residue of another purpose. Within his jeweled cane, within the same blue light were the echoes of the dead, blended together into a gestalt of consciousness. And here before me it has been made flesh.
Keitus Vieta has been gradually deconstructing the atoms created at the birth of the universe into other, unknown particles, like some kind of virus or cancer infecting the law of physics, altering the DNA of the universe to suit its own design. Left unchecked to continue growing as Keitus adds more to it, this tumor will eventually create an imbalance so great, the cycles of the universe will stop completely. No more universe. No more life. Ever again.
I can’t wallow in self-pity and defeat any longer. I have to stop him. But I still don’t know how.
I could ask Control to purge the garden, but Keitus is patient. He will wait as long as it takes to build again, feeding another new embryo with the energies gathered by the death of each human.
I have to find a permanent solution. Soome’s experience told me Vieta can’t die, but everything has its vulnerabilities. Perhaps I can find out his. Or perhaps even persuade him to stop. Either way, I need to have a plan—several plans—if I am to succeed.