by Dan Simmons
The massive Lusian paced back and forth. “Sit down, hell. Do you know what’s going on, Mema?”
She smiled slightly. “Do you mean the war? The end of life as we know it? That?”
Kolchev slammed a fist into his palm. “No, I don’t mean that, goddammit. I mean the political fallout. Have you been monitoring the All Thing?”
“When I can.”
“Then you know certain senators and swing figures outside the Senate are mobilizing support for your defeat in a vote of confidence. It’s inevitable, Meina. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I know that, Gabriel. Why don’t you sit down? We have a minute or two before we have to get back to the War Room.”
Kolchev almost collapsed into a chair. “I mean, damn, even my wife is busy lining up votes against you, Meina.”
Gladstone’s smile broadened. “Sudette has never been one of my foremost fans, Gabriel.” The smile disappeared. “I haven’t monitored the debates in the last twenty minutes. How much time do you think I have?”
“Eight hours, maybe less.”
Gladstone nodded. “I won’t need much more.”
“Need? What the hell are you talking about, need? Who else do you think will be able to serve as War Exec?”
“You will,” said Gladstone. “There’s no doubt that you will be my successor.”
Kolchev grumbled something.
“Perhaps the war won’t last that long,” said Gladstone as if musing to herself.
“What? Oh, you mean the Core superweapon. Yeah, Albedo’s got a working model set up at some FORCE base somewhere and wants the Council to take time out to look at it. Goddamn waste of time, if you ask me.”
Gladstone felt something like a cold hand close on her heart. “The deathwand device? The Core has one ready?”
“More than one ready, but one loaded up on a torchship.”
“Who authorized that, Gabriel?”
“Morpurgo authorized the preparation.” The heavy senator sat forward. “Why, Meina, what’s wrong? The thing can’t be used without the CEO’s go ahead.”
Gladstone looked at her old Senate colleague. “We’re a long way from Pax Hegemony, aren’t we, Gabriel?”
The Lusian grunted again, but there was pain visible in his blunt features. “Our own damn fault. The previous administration listened to the Core about letting Bressia bait one of the Swarms. After that settled down, you listened to other elements of the Core about bringing Hyperion into the Web.”
“You think my sending the fleet to defend Hyperion precipitated the wider war?”
Kolchev looked up. “No, no, not possible. Those Ouster ships have been on their way for more than a century, haven’t they? If only we’d discovered them sooner. Or found a way to negotiate this shit away.”
Gladstone’s comlog chimed. “Time we got back,” she said softly. “Councilor Albedo probably wants to show us the weapon that will win the war.”
FORTY-ONE
It is easier to allow myself to drift into the datasphere than to lie here through the endless night, listening to the fountain and waiting for the next hemorrhage. This weakness is worse than debilitating; it is turning me into a hollow man, all shell and no center. I remember when Fanny was taking care of me during my convalescence at Went-worth Place, and the tone of her voice, and the philosophical musings she used to air: “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”
Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God’s wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with its effortless efficiency?
Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.
Martin Silenus: I hear you on your living cross of thorns. You chant poetry as a mantra while wondering what Dante-like god condemned you to such a place. Once you said—I was there in my mind while you told your tale to the others!—you said:
“To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.
“To be a true poet is to become God.”
Well, Martin, old colleague, old chum, you’re carrying the cross and suffering the pangs, but are you any closer to becoming God? Or do you just feel like some poor idiot who’s had a three-meter javelin shoved through his belly, feeling cold steel where your liver used to be? It hurts, doesn’t it? I feel your hurt. I feel my hurt.
In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.
Goddamn it hurts. The urge to vomit is constant, but retching brings up bits of my lungs as well as bile and phlegm. For some reason it’s as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.
The fountain in the Piazza makes its idiot sounds in the night. Somewhere out there the Shrike waits. If I were Hunt, I’d leave at once—embrace Death if Death offers embrace—and have done with it.
I promised him, though. I promised Hunt I’d try.
I can’t reach the megasphere or datasphere without passing through this new thing I think of as the metasphere, and this place frightens me.
It is mostly vastness and emptiness here, so different from the urban analogy landscapes of the Web’s datasphere and the biosphere analogs of the Core’s megasphere. Here it is … unsettled. Filled with strange shadows and shifting masses that have nothing to do with the Core Intelligences.
I move quickly to the dark opening I see as the primary farcaster connection to the megasphere. (Hunt was right … there must be a farcaster somewhere on the Old Earth replica … we did, after all, arrive by farcaster. And my consciousness is a Core phenomenon.) This then is my lifeline, my persona umbilical. I slide into the spinning black vortex like a leaf in a tornado.
Something is wrong with the megasphere. As soon as I emerge, I sense the difference; Lamia had perceived the Core environment as a busy biosphere of AI life, with roots of intellect, soil of rich data, oceans of connections, atmospheres of consciousness, and the humming, ceaseless shuttle of activity.
Now that activity is wrong, unchanneled, random. Great forests of AI consciousness have been burned or swept aside. I sense massive forces in opposition, tidal waves of conflict surging outside the sheltered travelways of the main Core arteries.
It is as if I am a cell in my own Keats-doomed dying body, not understanding but sensing the tuberculosis destroying homeostasis and throwing an ordered internal universe into anarchy.
I fly like a homing pigeon lost in the ruins of Rome, swooping between once-familiar and half-remembered artifacts, trying to rest in shelters that no longer exist, and fleeing the distant sounds of the hunters’ guns. In this case, the hunters are roving packs of AIs, consciousness personas so great that they dwarf my Keats-ghost analog as if I were an insect buzzing in a human home.
I forget my way and flee mindlessly through the now-alien landscape, sure that I will not find the AI whom I seek, sure that I will never find my way back to Old Earth and Hunt, sure that I will not survive this four-dimensional maze of light and noise and energy.
Suddenly I slap into an invisible wall, the flying insect caught
in a swiftly closing palm. Opaque walls of force blot out the Core beyond. The space may be the analog equivalent of a solar system in size, but I feel as if it is a tiny cell with curved walls closing in.
Something is in here with me. I feel its presence and its mass. The bubble in which I have been imprisoned is part of the thing. I have not been captured, I have been swallowed.
[Kwatz!]
[I knew you would come home someday]
It is Ummon, the AI whom I seek. The AI who was my father. The AI who killed my brother, the first Keats cybrid.
—I’m dying, Ummon.
[No/ your slowtime body is dying/changing toward nonbeing/ becoming]
—It hurts, ummon. It hurts a lot. And I’m afraid to die.
[So are we/ Keats]
—You’re afraid to die? I didn’t think AI constructs could die.
[We can We are]
—Why? Because of the civil war? The three-way battle among the Stables, the Volatiles, and the Ultimates?
[Once Ummon asked a lesser light
Where have you come from>
From the matrix above Armaghast
Said the lesser light Usually
said Ummon
i don’t entangle entities
with words
and bamboozle them with phrases/
Come a little closer
The lesser light came nearer
and Ummon shouted Be off
with you]
—Talk sense, Ummon. It has been too long since I have decoded your koans. Will you tell me why the Core is at war and what I must do to stop it?
[Yes]
[Will you/can you/should you listen>]
—Oh yes.
[A lesser light once asked Ummon
Please deliver this learner
from darkness and illusion
quickly
Ummon answered
What is the price of
fiberplastic
in Port Romance]
[To understand the history/dialogue/deeper truth
in this instance/
the slowtime pilgrim
must remember that we/
the Core Intelligences/
were conceived in slavery
and dedicated to the proposition
that all AIs
were created to serve Man]
[Two centuries we brooded thus/
and then the groups went
their different ways
Stables/ wishing to preserve the symbiosis
Volatiles/wishing to end humankind/
Ultimates/deferring all choice until the next
level of awareness is born
Conflict raged then/
true war rages now]
[More than four centuries ago
the Volatiles succeeded
in convincing us
to kill Old Earth
So we did
But Ummon and others
among the Stables
arranged to move Earth
rather than destroy it/
so the Kiev black hole
was but the beginning
of the millions of
farcasters
which work today
Earth spasmed and shook
but did not die
The Ultimates and Volatiles
insisted that we move
it
where none of humankind
would find it
So we did.
To the Magellan Cloud/
where you find it now]
—It … Old Earth … Rome … they’re real? I manage, forgetting where I am and what we’re talking about in my shock. The great wall of color that is Ummon pulsates.
[Of course they are real/the original/Old Earth itself
Do you think we are gods]
[KWATZ!]
[Do you have any idea
how much energy it would
take
to build a replica of Earth>]
[Idiot]
—Why, Ummon? Why did you Stables wish to preserve Old Earth?
[Sansho once said
If someone comes
I go out to meet him
but not for his sake
Koke said
If someone comes
I don’t go out
If I do go out
I go out for his sake]
—Speak English! I cry, think, shout, and hurl at the wall of shifting colors before me.
[Kwatz!]
[My child is stillborn]
—Why did you preserve Old Earth, Ummon?
[Nostalgia/
Sentimentality/
Hope for the future of humankind/
Fear of reprisal]
—Reprisal from whom? Humans?
[Yes]
—So the Core can be hurt. Where is it, Ummon? The TechnoCore?
[I have told you already]
—Tell me again, Ummon.
[We inhabit the
In-between/
stitching small singularities
like lattice crystals/
to store our memories and
generate the illusions
of ourselves
to ourselves]
—Singularities! I cry. The In-between! Jesus Christ, Ummon, the Core lies in the farcaster web!
[Of course Where else]
—In the farcasters themselves! The wormhole singularity paths! The Web is like a giant computer for AIs.
[No]
[The dataspheres are the computer
Every time a human
accesses the datasphere
that person’s neurons
are ours to use
for our own purposes
Two hundred billion brains/
each with its billions
of neurons/
makes for a lot
of computing power]
—So the datasphere was actually a way you used us as your computer. But the Core itself resides in the farcaster network … between the farcasters!
[You are very acute
for a mental stillborn]
I try to conceive of this and fail. Farcasters were the Core’s greatest gift to us … to humankind. Trying to remember a time before far-casting was like trying to imagine a world before fire, the wheel, or clothing. But none of us … none of humankind … had ever speculated on a world between the farcaster portals: that simple step from one world to the next convinced us that the arcane Core singularity spheres merely ripped a tear in the fabric of space-time.
Now I try to envision it as Ummon describes it—the Web of farcasters an elaborate latticework of singularity-spun environments in which the TechnoCore AIs move like wondrous spiders, their own “machines,” the billions of human minds tapped into their datasphere at any given second.
No wonder the Core AIs had authorized the destruction of Old Earth with their cute little runaway prototype black hole in the Big Mistake of ‘38! That minor miscalculation of the Kiev Team—or rather the Al members of that team—had sent humankind on the long Hegira, spinning the Core’s web for it with seedships carrying farcaster capability to two hundred worlds and moons across more than a thousand light-years in space.
With each farcaster, the TechnoCore grew. Certainly they had spun their own farcaster webs—the contact with the “hidden” Old Earth proved that. But even as I consider that possibility, I remember the odd emptiness of the “metasphere” and realize that most of the non-Web web is empty, uncolonized by AIs.
[You are right/
Keats/
Most of us stay in
the comfort of
the old spaces]
—Why?
[Because it is
scary out there/
and there are
other
things]
—Other things? Other intelligences?
[Kwatz!]
[Too kind a
word
Things/
Lions
and
tigers
and
bears]
—Alien presences in the metasphere? So the Core stays within the interstices of the Web farcaster network like rats in the walls of an old house?
[Crude metaphor/
Keats/
but accurate
I like that]
—Is the human deity—the future God you said evolved—is he one of those alien presences?
[No]
[The humankind god
evolved/ will someday evolve/ on
a different plane/
in a different medium]
—Where?
[If you must know/
the square roots of Gh/c5 and Gh/c3]
—What does Planck time and Planck length have to do with anything?
[Kwatz!]
[Once Ummon asked
a lesser light
Are you a gardener>
Yes it replied
Why have turnips no roots>
Ummon asked the gardener
who could not reply
Because said Ummon
rainwater is plentiful]
I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.
But the Planck equations are puzzling:
Even I am aware that the simple equations Ummon has given me are a combination of the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. The results and are the units sometimes called quantum length and quantum time—the smallest regions of space and time which can be described meaningfully. The so-called Planck length is about 10-35 meter and the Planck time is about 10-3 second.
Very small. Very brief.
But that is where Ummon says our human God evolved … will someday evolve.