The Path of the Four

He wore faded jeans and the tide lapped around his ankles. He wore a hooded sweat jacket, but the hood was down and he wore an old-fashioned fedora on his head.

“Uh, hi,” Joe said. “Where did you come from?”

“Hyperspace. You somehow found a way to navigate through hyperspace, without a spaceship?”

“Excellent deduction, Ariana. That’s it. That’s what I did.”

“Brother Chaos. I told Human Security he was some type of pattern of sentient energy, an extraterrestrial we haven’t made official Second Contact with yet -– And -- And does Brother Chaos live in hyperspace or something like that?”

“Something like that. He’s--‘it,’ I guess would be accurate, but I think of the masked one as ‘he’--he is on our side. But he has a cruel sense of humor, so that might have been misleading.” He paused. “Now. The Hermes Lattice. What do we do about it?”

“You don’t know?”

“Brother Chaos has told me about your admiration of me, Ariana. It’s very nice of you. I have accomplished a lot--but everybody has limitations. Even a so-called ‘boy genius.’”

Ariana wondered what else about her Brother Chaos knew. If he knew about her sexual desire for her brother Ariana hoped Brother Chaos kept that to himself.

Ariana rested her chin in the palm of her hand for a moment.

“Well, assuming we can get into Brantley’s office--”

“We can,” Yamato said. “I’ll go into that in a moment.”

“I can introduce a program into the Lattice that simulates a paranoid-schizophrenic breakdown and renders the whole system inoperable.”

“You mean like a computer virus?” Joe looked proud for having thought up the question.

“No,” Ariana replied. “An advanced system like the Hermes Lattice would be impervious to a virus, a worm, anything like that--the whole system would be able to shrug it off. But since it’s an a.i., modeled after a Human mind, we need to neutralize in a way that would do the same thing to a Human mind.”

“Give it an artificial nervous breakdown, in other words,” Joe said. “I guess telling it’s ugly, unloved, and forgot to take the garbage out last Friday wouldn’t be enough. Nothing against our lady Ariana here, but any reason Brother Chaos can’t do this thing to Brantley’s gizmo? I mean, with everything I’ve seen him do --”

“Ah, the limitations of language,” Yamato said. “As I said before, Brother Chaos is an ‘it,’ to be correct about it, not a ‘he’ or a ‘she.’ It’s not just a question of more than the usual number of genders, as it is with the Zah-Gre. Brother Chaos it, he is a whole new form of life. Even Ariana’s deduction isn’t one hundred percent correct, but it’s close. And, at last, to answer your question, Brother Chaos can’t neutralize the Hermes Lattice because everybody, and everything, has limitations.”

Ariana got out of the boat, and stood in the water, the tide lapping around her knees, beginning to float her robe. The light from Voh-Heem’s torch played on the water and off Yamato’s face.

Blood from the cut above her eye that Hargrove made when he hit her with his gun trickled down past her eyebrow. The scar on her back that she got in Luna City, the larger of the two communities on Earth’s moon, began to ache.

Ariana felt Joe behind her waiting for whatever she was going to do or say next and she felt Voh-Heem just waiting and Faz-Gar satisfied, fulfilled, his part in the story, the game, the pageant at an end.

“Mr. Yamato,” Ariana said. “Brother Chaos. Why does he care? Why is he so interested in Earth and Zah-Gre?”

“I can tell you. But first I have to know if you, and Joe, are willing to make a major change in your lives, to spend the years it will take to dismantle what Brantley did, which was give people Heaven, by making secret payments to Hell.”

“I’m up for it,” Joe said. “Will it hurt?”

“Maybe,” Yamato replied.

“Good. When I hit a guy I don’t just want blood out of his nose; I want my fist to ache.” Ariana, Faz-Gar, Voh-Heem, and Yamato looked at him. “Hey, everybody relax. It was a figure of speech.” Joe took out his two pistols and hurled them far into the ocean. “See?”

“A ‘yes’ from Mr. Whitney,” Yamato said. “And you, Ariana?”

“‘Yes’ for me too. But can I say something?”

“Of course.”

Ariana smiled, brushed some hair out of her eyes with a hand, and pointed at Yamato’s fedora.

“Nice hat!”