The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Saints alive,” she muttered. This is an artificial gravity field. “You can manipulate gravity,” she said to Immanueel.

  “Yes.”

  “Again: impressive.”

  “I would say thank you, but it is you we should be thanking.”

  “How do you see that?”

  “We exist because of you. If we have built something that impresses you, I am pleased. You are the root from which all we are has grown.”

  Yirella just knew she’d be blushing. “Ah, right.”

  She searched around for other neutron star inhabitants, but the only people on the plaza were ones from the fleet still coming through the portal. “Where is your delegation?” she asked.

  Immanueel tipped their head to one side in a distinctly avian motion. “I’m sorry. This physical aspect of mine will be present for the congress. Further attendance of my faction colleagues will be through their direct data aspect involvement. Apart from Ainsley; he has manifested as an android.”

  “He has?”

  “Yes.” Immanueel performed another elaborate gesture, indicating the elevated disk building. “If you would join us?”

  Together, they walked across the plaza toward the lofty braids of wisteria trunks, and Yirella realized she’d misjudged the size. The disk was a lot bigger than she’d thought: a hundred fifty meters in diameter at least.

  “What is this place?”

  “It is your Hospitality House.”

  “I love the flowers.”

  “Thank you. We timed the blossom season for this moment.”

  She saw the blue glow of a portal rim just behind the pillar. They stepped through together, coming out in the center of the building. It was a single big hall, twenty meters high, walled by the curving rim of windows. Right at the center was a thick multifaceted crystalline pillar, flared at the base and ceiling. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a real diamond; the pristine gleam certainly laid a claim to authenticity. Each of the facets shone with a prismatic luster that was slowly fluctuating, as if tiny things were moving inside, distorting the light.

  “My colleagues’ aspects,” Immanueel said formally. “Most of them are at analytic.”

  Yirella inclined her head to the pillar. “I’m delighted to meet you.”

  As one, every point of light swung to rose-gold, flooding the spacious hall with a glorious twilight haze. Yirella smiled politely. She was sure she was misinterpreting some of Immanueel’s conversation. When she glanced around, she registered the vaguely puzzled expressions marring Dellian and Alexandre’s faces. “And by analytic, you mean?”

  “Ah. The mode my colleagues utilize to encompass this congress will scrutinize and deliberate. When we elevated ourselves out of our birthform, we redistributed our mentality across several physical repositories. Today, each individual currently resident in the ring is a unified corpus. This biophysical body is only one part of me.”

  To her mind it sounded like heresy, but she asked it anyway. “Like an Olyix quint?”

  The pillar flickered excitedly with opalescent light.

  “A not dissimilar analogy,” Immanueel conceded. “Except that once we matured, we chose to amplify our minds; our corpus are a great deal more than simple backup, which is the basis behind the quint model. My mind, for example, is perfectly interfaced with a quantum processing network as well as biological components that are subject to neurochemical and hormonal distortions. This way, I retain a complete human emotional response to my environment as well as uplifting my intellectual capacity and thoughtspeed. A different set of neurological segments amplify intuition, or whimsy. I consider that aspect to be the most connected with the birthform mind. I still dream, Yirella.”

  The smile she gave Immanueel was tainted by sadness. “And which corpus component holds your soul?”

  Immanueel clapped in admiration. “An excellent question. You are truly the genesis human Ainsley spoke of. It is a question that would no doubt delight the ancient Greek philosophers.”

  “And you?”

  “The soul is an abstract. It is everywhere and nowhere within the corpus. It is nothing and everything.”

  “The one flaw in rationality, yet also the path to greatness.”

  “Exactly. Our humanity, the same as yours.”

  “Completely different.”

  “I confess I was worried about meeting you, Yirella. There is a saying from old Earth: Never meet your idol. But you are everything I envisaged you would be.”

  “You haven’t had to argue with her yet,” Dellian said in a low voice. “Let me know how much admiration you have left after that happens.”

  Yirella gave his grinning face the finger.

  “Ah, the genesis human’s boyfriend,” Immanueel said.

  “Has a name,” Yirella admonished.

  “Never could be assed to learn it,” a familiar voice announced loudly.

  She turned to see a pearl-white human male striding across the floor. She knew he was male because he was naked—and anatomically correct. His facial features were easily identifiable. “Hello, Ainsley.”

  “Hey there, kid. Good to see you, in the flesh.”

  “The initiator couldn’t do clothes?”

  “Never had you down as a prude.”

  “Okay: The initiator couldn’t do color?” The android’s whiteness was absolute—eyes, hair strands, the inside of his mouth. Everything was just the same plastic material.

  “I’m being economical. Just because we’re post-scarcity doesn’t mean we should be profligate.”

  “Couldn’t be assed, then?”

  “Fucking A.”

  Yirella didn’t know if she should be laughing or sneering at Ainsley’s android avatar, yet somehow she wasn’t surprised by it. “So what now?”

  “Congress!” He winked, a disturbing pucker on his perfectly smooth face.

  Dellian smirked.

  “Oh, Saints save us,” Yirella groaned. She saw there were eighteen captains in the big hall. “Shall we begin?” she asked Alexandre.

  “I think so, yes.” Sie bowed slightly to Immanueel. “I hope you will be patient with us. Not everyone here is as fast as Yirella.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’d like to start by thanking you for this reception. You said you built this habitat for us?”

  “Yes. I’m pleased you like it. It took us six weeks to mature it.”

  Alexandre drew a breath ready for his next question, but Yirella held a hand up.

  “We’re not at your level, are we?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  She closed her eyes, focusing on what she’d seen and heard. “Natural gravity is a product of space-time curvature.”

  “Yes?”

  “But you have full mastery of it. This habitat is proof of that.”

  “We do.”

  “So you can create wormholes, for which you’d have to manipulate negative energy?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same technology as the Olyix. So, you have a phenomenal amount of control over the fabric of space-time.” She clicked her fingers. “Seasons. You said you timed the seasons so the wisteria would be in flower for today. That means this is an enclave, but the opposite of the Olyix one.”

  “Huh?” Dellian grunted.

  “Now I am the one impressed,” Immanueel said.

  She turned to Del. “This is and is not a new habitat, depending on your observer viewpoint. It was built a short while ago, then Immanueel’s people changed the internal time flow. Inside the Olyix enclave, time flows slowly relative to an external observer, allowing them to travel to the end of the universe without suffering too much aging and entropy. In here, time flows quickly relative to that same observer. So those trees in the forest are genuinely hundreds of
years old.”

  “Fuck the Saints,” Dellian muttered.

  “Which must take a phenomenal amount of power?” Yirella looked expectantly at Immanueel.

  “We derive it directly from the neutron star.”

  “Wow.”

  “If we are to successfully negate the Olyix enclave, we knew we had to understand the mechanism that creates and maintains it. It was one of our first accomplishments after we extended our minds.”

  Dellian looked around at the crews from the fleet. “Anyone still think Yirella did the wrong thing?”

  Ainsley’s white hand slapped him on the shoulders. “My man!”

  “All right, Dellian,” Alexandre said. “Let’s try and be constructive here, shall we?”

  There were tiers of heavy wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle, all facing the crystal pillar. Yirella got the impression they were all handmade—and if not, someone had made a big effort to design tiny differences into the carved oak.

  Immanueel sat in front of the twinkling pillar on the largest chair; its bifurcated backrest was obviously intended to accommodate a tail. The captains and crew from the fleet found themselves spaces in the rows of chairs facing their host. Yirella wound up in the front, sitting between Ainsley and Alexandre, with Dellian on the seat behind her. She knew from his buttoned-down expression that he was stifling a laugh.

  “What?” she asked from the side of her mouth.

  “We’re in the court of the elven king now,” he replied.

  When she glanced forward again, she had to agree. Immanueel’s size made for an imposing figure, and their chair could easily be a throne. Looked at without modern filters, the baroque rustic hall with its weight of new ages bestowed the setting a convincingly regal appearance: the benign monarch granting loyal courtiers an audience.

  Some of them with regicide and revolution on their minds. She saw Kenelm three rows back, hir disapproval unconstrained as sie scrutinized the hall’s gently domed ceiling.

  “If I may, I will start with a brief history,” Immanueel said. “We initiated our transition up from baseline human form five years after we were birthed out of the seedship biologic initiators, some fifty-five years ago in Earth standard years—normal space-time existence. Yet we are not a monoculture. Many of us chose neural expansion in tandem with corpus elaboration; others did not. Some, like myself, decided to wait here and meet you for the sole purpose of traveling together to the Olyix enclave and instigating FinalStrike.”

  Yirella shot Alexandre a surprised glance, which seemed to be mirrored on hir expression.

  “As such,” Immanueel continued, “we have devoted ourselves to developing what Ainsley insists on calling weapons hardware.”

  “So you are going to help take on the Olyix enclave?” Alexandre asked.

  “Indeed, yes. I hold the view that the Olyix cannot go unchallenged—especially in view of their impact on human history.” Behind Immanueel, the pillar underwent a burst of shimmering colors.

  “Can I ask how many of you hold that view?” Wim queried. “In fact, how many of you are there?”

  “That last question is now unanswerable,” Immanueel said. “Many of us have already left; they have already begun to expand and populate their own domains.”

  “Who left?”

  “They are called the egress faction; they refute the notion of inter-species conflict. They rightly regarded it as immature and irrelevant to high-scale evolutionites such as ourselves. We do not need to fight; we are able to simply rise above such animal-origin situations. It is our belief the Olyix do not have the ability to capture and cocoon us. However, since we began to change this star’s rotation speed, the Olyix will inevitably arrive here at some point. Therefore the egress faction departed, traveling to other stars where they will establish themselves in new space-time-extrinsic domains.”

  “You mean enclaves?” Yirella said.

  “I expect some egressor domains will incorporate alternative time-speeds relative to universal space-time, yes.”

  “Sanctuary,” Dellian exclaimed.

  “New sanctuaries,” Immanueel corrected. “We have no knowledge of the Sanctuary that Factory humans and the Katos went on to establish.”

  “How many of this egress faction left?” Yirella asked.

  “Fifty-seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-two,” Immanueel replied. “Each of them established a squadron of powerful battle cruisers in case they encountered a Resolution ship before they could inaugurate their domain.”

  “I’m sorry? Each of them?” Yirella’s question kicked off a lot of murmuring in the audience behind her.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean they all went their individual way?” she asked incredulously.

  “Of course. We are all individuals. That is the freedom you gave us. Everybody here is independent, and nobody is answerable to another. It is the final liberation. Thanks to you, genesis human.”

  She could well imagine the expression on Kenelm’s face.

  “Wait,” Tilliana said. “You told us all these egress people are now expanding their population?”

  “Correct. Although individual, we retain our social nature. Everyone who left here has or will found their own society.”

  “At fifty-seven thousand different stars?”

  “Yes. To begin with, anyway. Stars are needed as a power source for space-time-extrinsic domains. I expect they will simply take gas giants out of orbit and convert their mass to energy once they have constructed the appropriate structures.”

  Like everyone in the hall, Yirella was silent for a moment as she tried to appreciate the implication of what Immanueel had just told them. “So who remained?” she finally asked. “Apart from yourself.”

  “We call ourselves the history faction.”

  “Okay. So how many of you are there in this history faction?”

  “Three thousand five hundred and seventeen.” Their hand waved leisurely at the crystal pillar, which briefly flared a twilight amber.

  The hall was silent again. “Three and a half thousand?”

  “Yes. That number troubles you? You consider it to be low? Do not worry, I assure you we have the ability to destroy the Olyix enclave.”

  Yirella couldn’t make herself look at the Ainsley android. Her body had chilled too much to do anything but stare at Immanueel on their not-throne. Very carefully, she said: “The seedships were tasked with growing a base population of a hundred thousand humans in biologic initiators. You have been here for sixty years now. I’d like to know what happened to everyone who isn’t egress or history.”

  “I see you are concerned,” Immanueel said. “Not all of the original hundred thousand elected to a corpus elaboration. Call them naturalists. They remained in their original bodyform. Many even refused neurological enhancement.”

  “People like us, then?” Dellian said.

  “Indeed.”

  “So where are they now?” Yirella asked.

  “Those who were birthed here are now dead.”

  “What?”

  “Do not be alarmed. They all died from old age. Many underwent multiple cellular replacement treatments—rejuvenation, if you like—during their life. The eldest was just short of four thousand years old when she finally passed. It was a moving ceremony. Every corpus who was here at the time attended in a biophysical body to honor her.”

  Yirella let the air out of her body in a long breath. I need time to adapt to the possibilities that are open here, to make them part of my instincts.

  “The naturalists must have had children,” Wim said.

  “They did,” Immanueel said enthusiastically. “There were eighteen separate domains built to house them, each with a slightly different social structure. Some more…successful than others.” For once, Immanueel’s serene composure flickered. “Geo
rge Santayana was correct: Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. But all who were birthed here eventually adapted and prospered. The domains containing their societies were taken away by the egress faction, where they will be protected and nurtured once time is restarted within them.”

  “Four thousand years,” Wim mused. “What were their populations when they left?”

  “Uncertain. Those of us who are corpus don’t like to interfere with naturalists. But it would be several million in each domain. Some had started to develop sub-domains.”

  “What sort of lives did they have? What did they do?”

  “There are recordings of their existence available for you to review should you wish to indulge your curiosity.”

  “Thank you. I would be interested.”

  “So now you must start to decide,” Immanueel said. “I will be traveling to the Olyix enclave along with the rest of the history faction to launch our FinalStrike. Are you going to accompany us?”

  “Is there any point?” Dellian asked. He shrugged. “I mean, it sounds like each of you is at least as powerful as Ainsley. What the hell can we contribute? Saints, I don’t even get why you even bothered waiting for us.”

  “In terms of warships and weapons, we believe we have the resources to tackle the Olyix directly, thus completing the goal that Ainsley and Emilja set all those years ago. Once the enclave is breached, we need to locate the Salvation of Life and all the other arkships that store human cocoons—a not inconsiderable task, which by necessity will be conducted in an active war zone. Which leaves us with the question of your participation. You have committed yourselves to liberating natural humans from the Olyix, and those in the original Morgan squads have combat experience inside an Olyix vessel. We wished to honor your commitment by inviting you to join us. After all you have endured, we sincerely believed you deserved the chance to contribute to FinalStrike should you so choose. And, of course, we desired to meet the genesis human.”