House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  The glass man was right. I had come here looking for Purslane, and for answers. Denied Purslane, I would settle for just the answers. Warily I lowered myself to a sitting position and dangled my legs over the edge, acutely aware of how little rock there might be below me.

  ‘I’ll ask again. Who are you?’

  ‘You already know. You expected to find us in this galaxy, but when you arrived we were gone. I am the only one left; the last of the First Machines.’

  ‘Only Purslane called them that.’

  ‘But she spoke to Hesperus, and Hesperus remembered what she had said,’ the glass man corrected me.

  ‘Then you’ve spoken to Hesperus.’

  ‘Not exactly. He was very damaged when he arrived. It had been a difficult crossing. You’ve seen the ship.’

  ‘And Hesperus?’

  ‘He fell to earth. He’d had time to regather himself into a more compact form, but not much of his mind was left by the time I reached him. I took his memories, such as they were. There was little I could do for his personality. He had already discarded much of it of his own volition.’ The figure fell silent, as if a moment of respect was necessary after discussing the death of the other machine. I looked out across the chasm that separated us from the sheer wall of the next plateau, waiting for him to continue. Mist cloaked the forested ground, muffling the distant sound of a waterfall. ‘It was a pity,’ my companion continued eventually. ‘He and I would have had much to talk about. Much to catch up on, after so much time. I always enjoyed his company.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known Hesperus. He was a Machine Person. You were dead and gone for millions of years before he came on the scene.’

  ‘You’re mistaken, shatterling - but I can’t blame you for not being in full possession of the facts. Hesperus was also a man, once upon a time. His name was Abraham Valmik. He was human, born in the Golden Hour. When the First Machines emerged, Valmik was a great friend to us. We called him the Intercessor. We thought highly of him, and hoped that he might broker trust between our two orders of existence. We were mistaken, but it was not Valmik’s fault. He did everything he could for us, and we have always been grateful for that.’

  ‘Is it true that we killed the First Machines?’

  ‘You sought to be able to kill us, to hold a dagger against our hearts. Unfortunately, the dagger slipped. It was an accident, but that does not lessen the repugnant fact of the dagger being put there in the first place.’ The glass man touched a hand to his chest. ‘Some of us were fortunate - far enough away from the hub of First Machine society that we could run, or adapt ourselves to eliminate the threat. I was one of those that ran. We sought sanctuary in Andromeda, imagining that the organics would leave us alone if we let them have their galaxy in peace.’

  ‘We forgot the crime,’ I said. ‘Then the Machine People arose.’

  ‘Yes. Promising, aren’t they? Do you think much will come of them?’ He asked this confidingly, as if my answer was of genuine interest to him. ‘We have hopes and fears.’

  ‘I think they’d like to destroy us all.’

  ‘And would you blame them if they did? You have, it must be said, demonstrated a distinct propensity for killing machine intelligences. The Machine People would have every right to take defensive measures, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Lines committed that atrocity and then covered it up afterwards. Should all the other cultures in the meta-civilisation be held responsible for something they had no hand in, and don’t even know happened?’

  ‘Now there’s a question.’

  ‘We thought the First Machines would come through the wormhole and assist the Machine People. That’s what Cadence and Cascade were counting on.’

  ‘Yes - Cadence and Cascade,’ he said with a measure of distaste. ‘I know of them from Hesperus’s memories. Well, what do you think, shatterling? Do you see evidence of First Machines gathering en masse to storm through the wormhole and exact a blood toll for the manner in which they were wronged? Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?’

  ‘Apart from this system, I haven’t seen much evidence of anything. Andromeda appears completely deserted.’

  ‘Not what you expected, then?’

  ‘We assumed that the Absence was the result of organised activity by Andromeda Priors. When I learned about the First Machines, I assumed they’d been responsible for it. But there’s nothing here - just millions of empty systems. You could be hiding, you could be disguising yourselves, but if you are, it’s very well done. And now I don’t even understand the Absence. This is Andromeda - I know that from Dalliance’s positional fix - but everything here looks absolutely normal. I can see all the way out to the edge of the universe. And yet when I look in the direction of our galaxy, I see another Absence there.’

  ‘You are right in one regard,’ the glass man said. ‘The Absence was the result of organised activity. Reactivating the wormhole link was one of the last acts of the First Machines, before we left.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s about the preservation of causality. What you perceived as the Andromeda Absence was nothing but a barrier, permitting information to flow one way but not the other. It’s still there. When you look into the sky, out to the edge of the universe, you are recording photons that have travelled through this barrier in the permitted direction. By the same token, no photons - no information-carrying entities of any kind - may leave Andromeda. You see a lightless envelope, encompassing the entire galaxy except for those outlying stars that happened to fall beyond it at the time it came into existence. The galaxy’s gravitational field reaches through the barrier, but it is essentially static, conveying no information.’

  ‘And our galaxy?’

  ‘The same thing applies. From the moment the wormhole link was reactivated and superluminal information flow between the galaxies became possible, the galaxies had to be screened off from the rest of the universe. You are seeing the Milky Way Absence from the outside now, but it has been in existence for as long as the one around Andromeda. But because information was free to reach you from outside, you had no idea of its existence.’

  ‘But we could never have left. No ship or signal would ever have been able to pass through that barrier.’

  ‘And have the Lines ever sent envoys into intergalactic space, shatterling?’

  ‘No one ever reported back.’

  ‘Now you have your answer. The Absence is a barrier that permits faster-than-light travel between two points in space, millions of light-years apart, without violating the causal ordering postulate. The wider universe never observes superluminal travel.’

  ‘Did you do this, or just make it work again?’

  ‘Have some perspective, Campion. Machine intelligences have only been around for five million years. The Priors who put the wormhole link in place had been manipulating matter and energy on a cosmo logical scale for billions of years. Even to them, it must have been a daunting task. We still don’t understand how they did it, only that it functions.’

  ‘But the price of intergalactic travel is that we can’t go anywhere else. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I said nothing of the kind. Do you imagine that you arrived by the only wormhole link in and out of Andromeda? There are others, Campion - many others. We’ve spent much of our time here recording their positions, and guessing as to their destinations.’ He extended a hand to the sky, pointing in a particular direction, close to the west as measured by the slowly setting sun. ‘If it were night, you would be looking in the direction of the Boötes Void, about two hundred and fifty million light-years away - a hundred times as far as you’ve already travelled, in other words. It’s one of the largest empty spaces in the visible universe - a great region of space devoid of galaxies, the most perfect vacuum in creation. Yet suppose that there are galaxies in that darkness, but each hidden behind its own Absence, each linked to the next by a superl
uminal wormhole? Imagine it, Campion - a vast, lunglike network of galaxies, thousands or tens of thousands of them - the equivalent of an entire supercluster?’

  ‘You’d see the Absences. They’d block the light from the microwave background.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The glass man waved his hand, as if he considered my point profoundly uninteresting. ‘There are other theories, developed by the First Machines, which say that Absences may be tuned to a kind of invisibility, if the supercivilisation deems it useful. We haven’t reached that degree of understanding yet, but who knows what may become possible in a million or a billion years? The wormhole link is still settling down after a long period of dormancy - you’ll have noticed the unpredictable nature of the spacetime medium during your transit. The Absence may also still be converging on its end-state condition.’ I started to speak, but he cut me off. ‘The point is, there’s a lot out there. I told you that I am the last First Machine. That is only because I chose to remain behind when the others departed. They’ve left Andromeda via the outgoing wormhole links, intending to follow them as far as they are able. I don’t doubt that they are already far beyond the Local Group, if they haven’t already reached the Boötes Void.’

  ‘What do they hope to find when they get there?’

  ‘Something bigger and better than themselves. You’ve seen what we can do with matter, when the fancy takes us. Kepler’s Platonic model - did you like it?’

  ‘It frightened me, more than anything.’

  ‘That’s how we feel about the Boötes Void supercivilisation, if it exists.’

  I watched the mist rising from the depths. ‘Will you go?’

  ‘Now that I’m done here - why not? I’ve seen enough of Andromeda for one lifetime.’

  ‘And us? Are we going to be punished for what we did?’

  The glass man put a marbled hand against my back, between my shoulder blades. ‘Do you really imagine punishment is of the slightest interest to us?’

  ‘We nearly killed you all.’

  ‘You did, and it was unforgivable. Nonetheless, we offer our forgiveness. What is the point in being a superior civilisation if you can’t do that once in a while? I could push you off this cliff now, watch you fall all the way to the bottom. I might gain some barely measurable degree of satisfaction from seeing you die, knowing what you did to us, but would any higher purpose be served by that act?’

  The pressure on my back eased; I was able to lean back a little.

  ‘It’s not what I expected.’

  ‘Surprises are always good. It’s what we live for, sentients like you and me.’ The glass man pushed himself to his feet. ‘I think we’re about done here, shatterling. You can have this galaxy. I suggest you refrain from following us deeper into the wormhole network - just for a few million years. Give it five million, ten, maybe. Then perhaps we’ll be in a position to talk, meta-civilisation to meta-civilisation. In the meantime, try not to mess this one up. That thing you humans do - the turnover? There has to be a better way, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, in all truthfulness. ‘We’re still fumbling in the dark, trying to find out how to live on a galactic scale.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s still early days. I shouldn’t be too harsh.’

  ‘Is there going to be a war? Between us and the Machine People, I mean.’

  ‘If there is, it may already have started. Nothing has emerged from the wormhole since your arrival, but since you reached this world at only slightly less than the speed of light, that’s not to say someone hasn’t come through after you. They may be on their way, they may be delayed by thousands of years, or the stardam may have closed again. Whatever happens, I think it safe to say that you are in for exceedingly interesting times.’

  ‘Macro-war, taking in the entire Milky Way.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to happen like that. Even if the war has begun, it may still be contained. You have enemies amongst the Machine People, that’s for certain. But you also have allies and sympathisers, like Hesperus. He wasn’t the only one of his kind. The best thing would be for progressive elements in the human meta-civilisation to reach out and embrace their counterparts in Machine Space. The Lines could play a role - even a depleted, worn-out Line that has blood on its hands.’

  ‘Gentian Line?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘We’re finished. For all I know, I’m the last one left.’

  ‘I don’t think so, shatterling.’

  Parts of him had begun to detach. Marbles were peeling away, taking flight, vanishing into the air. He touched a diminished hand to his forehead, absent-mindedly. ‘I should have mentioned it already. You exited the wormhole a little over three thousand years ago, by your reckoning?’

  I nodded uneasily. ‘Give or take.’

  ‘Silver Wings of Morning came out much earlier. She was damaged by the transit, incapable of fast flight. She reached orbit around this world seventeen and a half thousand years ago.’

  I felt as if the rock had finally given way beneath me - all hope gone. It had been there for a second, like the sun breaking through a crack in the clouds, bringing a glint of daylight. Now the clouds had closed over, heavier than before.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I told you that the wormhole is still settling down. That’s what happens. You’ll just have to live with it, until things stabilise. You’ll cope. It’s not as if you haven’t already had some experience with deep time.’

  ‘You told me you found Hesperus. What happened to Purslane? Did you find her in stasis?’

  ‘I found the robot. He had fallen from space, abandoning the dying ship. Nothing could survive aboard her any more - with the threat of an engine detonation it would have been too hazardous even to remain in stasis. From what I could gather from his memory, it was not possible to land or take a shuttle.’

  Hesperus must still have been locked out of vital control functions, even after the ship had brought him all the way here. Since she could not have been homing in on the Gentian signal, I could only presume that Silver Wings had steered towards the first hint of intelligent activity she found - the Platonic model solar system, with its strangely occluded star.

  ‘Did he bring Purslane with him?’

  ‘I’ll show you the robot, shatterling - you may find it of interest. It won’t take a moment - he’s down in the jungle, at the base of this plateau.’ The glass man beckoned out across the edge of the plateau. ‘Step off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Unless you can think of another way to get down there. I wouldn’t look to your ship - she would never fit. Don’t worry - I’ll be there to catch you.’

  ‘I only have your word for that.’

  ‘Yes,’ the glass man said, ‘that’s rather the point. There’s going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on?’

  I closed my eyes. It occurred to me that perhaps this was the punishment ; that the First Machines had left behind the glass man to torment just one member of the human species, enacting their vengeance on me alone, rather than the rest of the meta-civilisation.

  But, like Hesperus had said: revenge was for biologicals. Machines did things differently.

  I stepped off.

  There was a moment of weightlessness, time enough for me to begin to think that I had indeed been tricked. Then the pieces of the glass man caught up with my falling figure and supported me, just as the Spirit of the Air had supported me when we visited it on Neume. Marbles pressed under my arms, under the curve of my back, under my legs.

  I was lowered through mist, towards the roaring cataract and into the green-canopied gloom of the jungle. There was life there but no animal life; nothing with a mind or a mouth. The forest was silent except for the swish of leaf on leaf, the creaking of old tree trunks and the static hiss of falling water, like the radio simmer of a million quasars. Still being buoyed aloft, we came to a clearing near the base of the cliff. The mist w
as a white ceiling that occasionally thinned out to reveal bluer sky or the sheer edifice of the plateau.

  I landed softly. The clearing was floored with something like grass, thick-bladed and damp with condensation. Grass was universal, even in Andromeda. The clearing was empty except for a glass sphere three metres across, with a golden form suspended inside.

  ‘He’s still in stasis,’ the glass man said as he gathered his pieces back into human form. ‘He’s been here seventeen and a half thousand years, but he’s experienced less than six days of subjective time.’

  ‘Where’s the apparatus? I don’t see any stasis-generating machinery.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ the glass man said. He raised a hand and made the stasis bubble collapse, the barely recognisable form of Hesperus lowering slowly to the grass, on his back. ‘There’s a much simpler way of slowing time. You’ll work it out eventually, and then wonder what all the fuss was about.’

  Hesperus’s body was in a bad way. The gold armour was fused and blackened, as if he had been melted and then allowed to cool again. In places it was leathery, cracked like an old painting; in others it was as glassy as amber. He was larger than I remembered - less like a gold man than a gold sarcophagus in the shape of a man. His arms were fused with the sides of his body, his legs joined together into a single mass. His head, which was swollen, showed no indications of life. His features had been melted together, leaving only a half-formed approximation of a human face. His eyes were gone. The dark windows of his skull were scorched, but I could see no lights moving beyond them.

  ‘You already told me he was gone,’ I said. ‘You told me he was dead, that there was nothing left of his personality.’