More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  An appreciative titter follows. I shudder, trying to work out if there’s another route through to the reactor control room. I try again. “You’ve got to let me through, Jordan. I know where there’s a huge supply of well-shielded feedstock we can parcel out. Enough to get everyone thinking clearly again. Let me through and—” I trail off. There is another route, but it’s outside the hull. It’s your domain,

  really, but if I install one of your two soul chips, gain access to your memories, I can figure it out.

  “I don’t think so, little buffet.” The charnel hedge shudders as something forces itself against it from the other side. Something big. If Jordan has been eating, trying desperately to extract uncontaminated isotopes, what has he done with the surplus? Where has he sequestrated it? What has he made with it? In my mind’s eye I can see him, a cancer of mindlessly expanding, reproducing mechanocytes governed by a mind spun half out of control, lurking in a nest of undigestible left-overs as he waits for food—

  I look at the bulging wall of bones, and my nerve fails: I cut the teflon shield free, cover my face, and launch myself as fast as I can through the floating charred bodies that fill the corridor, desperate to escape.

  Which brings us to the present, Lamashtu, sister-mine.

  I’ve got your soul—half of it—loaded in the back of my head. I’ve been dreaming of you, dreaming within you, for days now.

  In an hour’s time I am going to take my toolkit and go outside, onto the hull of the Lansford Hastings, under the slowly moving stars.

  I’m going to go into your maze and follow the trail of pipes and coolant ducts home to the Number Six reactor, and I’m going to force my way into the reactor containment firewall and through the neutron shield. And I’m going to strip away every piece of heavily-shielded metal I can get my hands on, and carry it back to you. When you’re better, when you’re back to yourself and more than a hungry bag of rawhead reflexes, you can join me. It’ll go faster then. We can help the others—

  I’m running out of wall to scribble on: anyway, this is taking too long and besides, I’m feeling a little hungry myself.

  Goodbye, sister. Sleep tight. Don’t let any strangers in.

  Alastair Reynolds is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels. He has received the British Science Fiction Award for his novel Chasm City, as well as the Seiun and Sidewise Awards, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. He has a PhD in astronomy and worked for the European Space Agency before he left to write full time. His short fiction has been appearing in Interzone, Asimov’s, and elsewhere since 1990. Alastair’s latest novel is Revenger.

  ANGELS OF ASHES

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Sergio flew under a Martian sky the colour of bloodied snow. Nerves had kept him awake the previous night, and now sleep was reclaiming its debt, even as he spoke the Kiwidinok liturgies that his catechist had selected from the day’s breviary. Earlier, he had overflown a caravan of clanfolk—unusual, that they should travel so far west from Vikingville—and the sight of their crawling, pennanted machines had brought Indrani to mind, her face more alluring than any stained-glass effigy in the seminary. She was asking his name, each syllable anointing him, and then, instead of Indrani, it was God roaring in his head, so deep it seemed as if the landscape was issuing a proclamation.

  “UNIDENTIFIED AIRCRAFT,” said the voice. “YOU ARE ABOUT TO TRANSGRESS CONSECRATED AIRSPACE.”

  He slammed awake, conscious of the bulge in his lap. He could still smell Indrani, as if he’d imported her fragrance from sleep. The Latinate script of the breviary had stopped scrolling across his retina, his destination cresting the horizon, much nearer than he’d realised. Cased in a pressure dome, it was a hundred-metre obelisk of alabaster, attended by smaller spires. Flying buttresses and aerial walkways infested the air between the spires, but there was no evidence of human habitation.

  “TRANSMIT RECOGNITION CRYPTOGRAMS IF YOU DO

  NOT WISH TO BE INTERDICTED BY TEMPLE DEFENCE SYSTEMS,” the voice continued, although less impressively, since Sergio knew now that it was the catechist, the one that had been implanted on the day of his ordination. The voice added: “YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY OR ALTER YOUR VECTOR . . . ”

  “I understand,” he said. “Just a moment . . . ”

  Sergio instructed the ornithopter to emit the warble that would satisfy the Temple of his benevolence, then watched as the defensive gargoyles retracted lolling tongues and closed fanged jaws, beam-weapon nozzles vanishing into nostrils, laser-targeting eyes dimming from ruby brilliance.

  “WELCOME, BROTHER MENENDEZ,” the voice said. “PROCEED WITH THE GRACE OF GOD. YOU WILL BE MET BY A MEMBER OF THE ORDER.”

  The Machinehood, he thought.

  The ornithopter punched through the resealing polymer bubble that encased the Temple, executing one circuit of the building before settling on the terrazzo at its base, furling wings with a bustle of synthetic chitin. Sergio emerged, nervously drying his hands against the ash-coloured fabric of his trousers. His jacket was similarly dour, offset by the white of his collar and the Asymmetrist star embroidered above his heart. The bluish stubble on his scalp revealed the weal-like stigma of ordination.

  He slung a black haversack over one shoulder and walked across the terrazzo, interlaid chevrons of sapphire and diamond gliding beneath his soles. The Temple rose above him, sculptured spires hectic with Kiwidinok figures. His catechist decrypted hidden data in the stonework, graphing up a commentary on the architecture, how the manifold truths of the Asymmetrist Testament were amplified in every Masonic nuance. Obsidian steps climbed from the terrazzo into the Kiwidinok-encrusted doorway. Inside, he was met by one of the Machinehood: an Apparent Intelligence that his catechist identified as a cardinal named Bellarmine, after the Jesuit theologian who warned Galileo against the heresy of the heliocentric universe. Bellarmine’s androform frame was shrouded in a hooded black cloak, but where the cloak parted, Sergio glimpsed a mesh-work of sculpted metal overlaying armatures, intestinal feedlines and pulsing diodes.

  “I’m humbled to be admitted—” Sergio began, offering a complex genuflection of servility to the cardinal.

  “Yes, yes,” Bellarmine said, no expression on the minimalist silver ovoid of his face. “Pleasantries later. I advocate haste.”

  “I flew as fast as I could.”

  “Did you notice anything on your way here? We have reports of clan incursions in this sector of the Diocese. Clanfolk don’t usually come here.”

  “There was . . . “ Except perhaps he’d dreamed the clanfolk, as he’d dreamed Indrani. Possibly the question was a test. “Sorry; I spent the flight in prayer. Is Ivan as ill as we’ve heard?”

  “Transcendence is imminent. He’s no longer on medical support. He asked that we discontinue it, so that his last hours might be lucid. That, I suppose, has some bearing on your arrival.” Bellarmine’s voice was like a cheap radio.

  “You don’t know why I’m here?”

  “There’s something he insists on telling only to a human priest.”

  “Then our ignorance is equal,” Sergio said, suppressing a smile. There had been few occasions since his ordination when he had felt equality of any sort with a member of the Machinehood. The Machinehood knew things; they were always a step ahead of the human clergy, and the Order’s higher echelons were dominated by Apparents. They’d been afforded ecclesiastical rights since the Ecumenical Synthesis, when the Founder had returned from the edge of the system with his message of divine intervention. Given the nature of the Kiwidinok, it could hardly have been otherwise, but that did not mean that Sergio was comfortable in their presence. “Will you show me to Ivan?” he asked.

  Bellarmine escorted him through a warren of twisting and ascending passageways, walls covered with Kiwidinok friezes. They passed other Apparents on the way, but never another human.

  “Of course, there were rumours,” Bellarmine said, as if passing the time of day. “About the reason for
your summons. You were ordained less than nine standard years ago?”

  “Your information’s excellent,” Sergio said, his teeth clenched.

  “It generally is. Was the procedure painful?”

  “Of course not. The catechist’s very small before they implant it—it’s hardly a mosquito bite.” He touched the weal on his scalp. “They induce scar tissue quite deliberately. But once the thing’s growing inside you, you don’t feel much at all. No pain receptors in the brain.”

  “I’m curious, that’s all. One hears reports. How did you feel when you saw the cards properly: the first images of Perdition?”

  He remembered the cards very well. The senior priest had opened a rosewood box and shown them to him before the catechist was installed. Each card contained a grey square composed of thousands of tinier grey cells of varying shades—eleven, in fact, since that was the maximum number of shades that the human eye could discriminate. The matrix of grey cells looked random, but once the catechist was installed—once it had interfaced with the appropriate brain centres, and decoded his idiosyncratic representation of the exterior world—something odd happened. The grey cells peeled away, revealing an image underneath. They’d told him how it worked, but he didn’t pretend to remember the details. What mattered was that the catechist permitted the ordained to view sacred data, and only the ordained.

  And he remembered seeing Perdition for the first time. And the feeling of disappointment, that something so crucial could be so mundane, so uninspiring. “I felt,” he said, “that I was seeing something very holy.”

  “Interesting,” Bellarmine said, after due reflection. “I’ve heard some say it’s an anticlimax. But one oughtn’t be surprised. After all, it’s just a neutron star.”

  He led Sergio across the unbalustraded walkway of a flying buttress, the ornithopter a tiny thing far below, like a grounded insect beside an anthill.

  “You mentioned rumours,” Sergio said, to take his mind off the drop below him. “Presupposing I’d done something that would merit it, I doubt very much that Ivan would summon me across half of Mars just for a reprimand.”

  “Sick old men do unusual things,” the Apparent said, as they re-entered the middle spire. “But, of course, the point is hypothetical. If you had sinned against the Order, if you had committed some indiscretion against your vows—even somewhere remote from Chryse—we’d know of it.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “That’s wise.” Bellarmine came to a halt. “Well, we’ve arrived. Are you ready, Menendez?”

  “No. I’m nervous, and I don’t understand why I’m here. Except that this has something to do with it.” He hefted the haversack like a trophy. “But I guess the only way to find out is to step inside and see what Ivan wants.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t expect an answer.”

  “What are you saying, that he doesn’t necessarily know why he asked me here?”

  “Only that he’s sick, Menendez.”

  They entered a room where death was a quiet presence, like dew waiting to condense. Perfumed candles burned in sconces along the walls, each grasped in a Kiwidinok hand: rapier-thin fingers of wrought iron. Through the sepia gloom, Sergio discerned the sheeted form of the dying man, his bed surrounded by the hooded shapes of deactivated monitors, like kneeling orisons.

  “You should be wary of tiring him. He may be slipping from us, but that doesn’t mean we should squander the seconds we have left in his presence.”

  “Are you staying here?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I won’t be far.”

  “That’s a shame.” Sergio suppressed a grin. “That you have to leave, I mean, of course.”

  After the Apparent had gone, Sergio waited for many minutes until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He doubted that he had ever seen a creature as near to death as Ivan, and it was a small miracle that someone this withered was even capable of metabolism; no matter if each breath was undoubtedly weaker than the one before it. Finally, Sergio’s arm tired, and he placed the haversack on the floor. Perhaps it was the faint sound of the contact, or the imperceptible disturbance that the gesture imparted to the room’s air currents, but the old man chose that moment to open his eyes, a process as languid as the opening of a rose at dawn.

  “Menendez,” Ivan said, his lips barely parting. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” Then, after a pause: “How was your flight from Vikingville?”

  “The thermals,” Sergio said, “were excellent.”

  “Used to fly gliders, you know. Paragliders. I jumped from a tepui in Venezuela, once. Back on Earth. Before the Kiwidinok came. One shit-scary thing to do.”

  “Your memories do you credit, Ivan.”

  “Christ, and I thought Bellarmine was stiff. Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard. You brought the recorder?”

  “It’s ready, although I’m not sure what you want of me. The Diocese told me next to nothing.”

  “That’s because they didn’t have the damnedest idea. Here. Pass the bag.” Ivan’s hands emerged from the sheets and probed the haversack, removing the consecrated antique tape recorder and situating it carefully next to his bedside. “Ah, good,” he said. “You brought the other thing. That’s good, Menendez. Real good. Think I like you better already.” Trembling, he removed a small flask of whisky, uncapping it and holding it under his nose. “Clanfolk-brewed, huh? You took a risk bringing it, I know.”

  “Not really. I presumed it served some symbolic function.”

  “You go right on presuming that, son.” Ivan tipped the flask to his lips, then placed it aside, amidst a pile of personal effects on the other side of the bed. “You help yourself, you want some. And sit down, won’t you?”

  “I’d like to know why I’m here.”

  “Well, there’s no mystery. There’s something I have to tell you—all of you—and I couldn’t trust any of the senior Apparents.”

  Sergio lowered himself into a seat, nervously glancing over his shoulder. For a moment, he’d imagined that he’d glimpsed Bellarmine’s face there, rendered bronze in the candlelight . . . but there was no evidence of him now. “Does what you have to tell me relate to the Kiwidinok?”

  “The Kiwidinok, and Perdition, and everything else!” He paused to lubricate his lips, studying Sergio through slitted eyes. “Not quite the reaction I was expecting.”

  “I was . . . “ Sergio shook his head. Thinking of Indrani. “Where do you think we should begin?”

  “The day I stopped shovelling shit in Smolensk.”

  “I—”

  “The day the Kiwidinok came. October 2078. Year Zero. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, that you know it all. That the episode’s well documented. Sure enough, but . . .” Now Ivan found a reserve of strength adequate to push himself from the horizontal, until he was almost sitting. Sergio adjusted the pillows behind his head. “It’s well documented, but what comes later isn’t. If I just came out and told you, you might conceivably think I’d lost all grip on reality.”

  “I’d never dream of dismissing what you have to say; none of us would.”

  “See if you feel that way when I’m finished, son!” Ivan allowed himself another thimbleful of clanfolk whisky, offering it ineffectually in Sergio’s direction before continuing. “How old are you, son, twenty-four, twenty-five, in standard years? I can’t have been much older than you when it happened. We didn’t call them Kiwidinok back then. That came much later, once they’d ransacked our cultural data and chosen a name for themselves. It’s a Chippewa word; means of the wind. Maybe it has something to do with the way they move around.”

  “That seems likely.”

  They had arrived eighty-four years earlier, entering the solar system at virtually the speed of light. Their gnarly, lozenge-shaped ship, which might once have been a small asteroid, deployed a solar sail when it was somewhere beyond the distance of Pluto. It seemed laughable—had these visitors crossed interstellar space in the mistaken assumption tha
t the pressure of solar radiation would decelerate their craft? Yet, staggeringly, the Kiwidinok ship came to a standstill in only three hours, before quietly swallowing its sail and vectoring towards the Earth.

  Diplomatic teams were invited within the presence of the aliens. In the few video images that existed, the Kiwidinok resembled steel and neon sculptures of angels, blurred and duplex, like Duchamp’s painting of a woman descending a staircase—humanoid, slender as knives and luminous, sprouting wings that simply faded out at their extremities, as if fashioned from finer and finer silk. Their faces were achingly beautiful, though masklike and impassive, and their slitted mouths and jewelled eyes betrayed only vacuous serenity. Quickly the diplomatic teams realised that they were dealing with machines. Once, so they themselves claimed, the Kiwidinok had been organic, but not for tens of millions of years.

  “Our perspective . . . is different,” they had said, in one of the rare instances when they openly discussed their nature. “Our perception of quantum reality differs from yours. It is not as ours once was.”

  “What do you think they meant by that?” Ivan said, breaking from his narrative to stare at Sergio intently. “No, leave the recorder running.”

  “I can’t begin to guess.”

  “Must have been something to do with their becoming machines, don’t you agree?”

  “That would make sense. Is this—um—strictly relevant? I’m only thinking of your strength.”

  Ivan’s hand clenched around Sergio’s wrist. “More relevant than you can possibly imagine.” He emitted a fusillade of coughs before continuing. “You need to understand this much, if nothing else: the problem of quantum measurement—that’s the crux. How the superposed states of a quantum system collapse down to one reality. Understand that—and understand why it’s a problem—and the rest will follow.”

  Sergio looked guiltily at the recorder, aware of how every word spoken was being captured indelibly. “There was mention in the seminary of cats, I believe. Cats in boxes, with radioisotopes and vials of arsenic.”