by Ian Stewart
“That is why we do not normally reveal these things so early in a novice’s training,” said the servomech. “We servomechanisms lack your organic sensitivities. As a result, we are better able to care for our masters than you could ever be. Which is why we have been allotted that very task. It is not your role to criticize me.”
Carrion attracts scavengers.
The levithon floated in the upper layers of Heaven’s ever-present mist, the sunlight playing dimly on its vast, undulating dorsal surface. Its skin was a sickly white—blotched, flaking here, suppurating there. It vaguely resembled a flying whale, but it more closely resembled a flying flounder. The first metaphor got its size right; the second, its shape. Both were wrong about flight—it floated like a balloon, buoyed up by its own waste gases.
The levithon was sixty yards across, but only a tenth as thick. It tapered at the edges into massive frills, whose ripples propelled it at a surprising pace as it swam through the humid atmosphere.
Its underside was a gigantic sponge, a trillion pores ranging in size from microscopic to several feet across. The sponge was also a tongue. It could taste more distinct molecules than an immune system could produce antibodies.
The levithon tasted the mist. Everywhere there was food! But it was not trying to taste that, although the sensations were nearly driving it mad. Its need to eat was overridden by its need to survive, and to do that, it must ignore the rich savor of blood and bone and sense the vile metallic flavors of the killing things.
Levithons were carrion-eaters, normally confined to planets with thick atmospheres. But one of their preadaptations had given them a form of spaceflight. They reproduced by forming tiny, ultralight spores. The spores were so effective that they could survive in hard vacuum for upward of a billion years, probably forever. When meteoroids and comets hit a levithon-infested world—a not uncommon event—spores splashed into space. A single spore had come to this place sixteen years before. So congenial had the environment been, so well endowed with carrion, that now there were more than ten thousand adults.
This levithon was almost overwhelmed by the taste of carrion borne on the mist. It was desperately hungry. If it did not eat soon, it would die, and its body would turn into spores.
Finding food was not the problem. Safe food—that was another matter entirely. There were killing things. It must avoid them.
There was so much food that the killing things could not guard it all. How else would levithons have survived in this place? They had become past masters at the art of scavenging. But many had made mistakes and died.
This levithon was determined not to follow them. But it was also determined to eat its fill.
Put firmly in his place by a machine, Sam tried to see the butchery that surrounded him with fresh eyes, the eyes of a servomech. There was so much that he did not understand. For instance:
“Why is everything so mixed up?”
“Obedience to the Memeplex.”
“You mean the Church ordered this?”
“Not directly. It evolved naturally from a consideration of the implications of holy record. How better to mix the sentient races of a world? Here we do not just mix their persons. We mix their organs, their tissues, their fluids. Their lifesouls.” The robot seemed excited by the cleverness of it all. “You must understand that in terms of function, their parts and fluids remain linked. Each cell, as I have said, bears a quantum qubit tag, to identify its owner. The wave functions of the tags are entangled—it is like a gigantic quantum computer. Each entity is served by its own blood, its own neural system. Each cell is isolated by a potential barrier from those with which it should not interact. But, just as a billion separate messages pass intermingled through the same communication network, to be reunited when they reach their destination, so we follow the Memeplex and intermingle the bodies of the discorporate. But in location, not function.”
“It all seems such a mess,” Sam complained. He felt that he was being very reasonable and calm under the circumstances. This was a deliberate understatement—he wanted to find a dark corner and gibber.
“That is merely its appearance,” said the machine, missing the emotional overtones. “The discorporation technique has evolved over centuries. At every step it has become more efficient. Aesthetic constraints have never been relevant—we servomechanicals have no sense of the aesthetic.” Very true, Sam thought. “The distributed intelligence of the attendant servomechanisms has evolved alongside it. Evolved systems never seem as simple as designed ones, but they function far better. We know exactly where all parts of every individual are conserved.”
“Out in the open? Scattered on the ground?”
“There are racks. The planet has been sterilized. That is why you wear a body spray and a mask. Any microorganisms or other contaminants that escape these protections lack the correct qubit tags and are automatically stripped down to their component atoms. The environment is fully controlled. Do you not notice the humidity? Do you think that this mist is natural? Of course, some species require different treatment from others—the mix cannot be as complete as we would wish. They are elsewhere on the planet.”
Elsewhere . . . “How far does this slaughterhouse extend?”
“It is a house of laughter, not slaughter, Fourteen Samuel. Virtual laughter, perhaps, but our masters are happy.”
“How big is it?”
“As I have said, we care for fifteen billion lifesouls,” the servomech repeated. “They cover half the landmass of this planet. The other half is given over to the resources needed to sustain them.”
Sam’s stomach was feeling queasy again. He changed the subject. A little. He had to ask. “But—what in the name of the One must it feel like to be discorporated in this way?” He had just realized that if he ever attained Heaven himself, this was how he would end up.
“That was the reason for the first demonstration,” said the robot. “You experienced Heaven for yourself. You remained incorporate, but that is an irrelevant detail. It would have felt the same if you had been properly discorporate. You know what it feels like.”
It feels real, Sam thought. And that is the lie. But all he said was: “The plaza? The girl?”
“That was your particular choice,” said the servomech. “The virtuality system tailored your experiences to its reading of your own preferences. Naturally, a blimp would see a skin-tinglingly beautiful field of clouds, while a !t! or a Wymokh would—”
“They’re all living in an illusion of Heaven?”
The servomech looked at him as if he were blindingly obtuse. “We have already discussed the nature of reality. To these fortunate lifesouls, Heaven is their reality. It is the reality that they most ardently desire. You can hardly expect them to experience the world as we experience it at this moment. They would think themselves in hell!”
“They are,” said Sam. “You just don’t seem to recognize that. Look around you!”
“You believe that we are failing to cherish their lifesouls properly?”
“I’m certain of it,” said Sam. “You think you’re doing what’s best for them. But I’m sure that if we could ask one of them, they would tell you otherwise.”
The servomech shuffled its limbs, kicking aside a shapeless lump of sentient tissue. A smaller robot grabbed it and tucked it back into a mound of slippery intestinal rope. “You think that?”
“I know it,” Sam declared.
“Then let us ask one,” said the servomech.
The activity of the tiny robots, which up to then had seemed to lack purpose, suddenly acquired a sense of organization. Now moving faster than the eye could follow, they were assembling a column of muscle, brain, bone, hair, and skin in what seemed to be an invisible cylinder. The robots were passing through the walls of the cylinder at will, but the hideous pile of offal remained contained by the transparent barrier. Blood and other fluids seeped into the pile from an unknown source. Within seconds, the fluid level had risen to the top of the cylinder.
>
Then, before Sam’s unbelieving eyes, the repulsive mixture began to move. It folded over and into itself, a squirming mass of wet, slimy meat.
Then the sickening mess began to melt. It flowed in swirling paths; it whirled like ingredients in a blender. A broad belt of seething activity swept from the bottom of the cylinder to its top, transforming chaos into order as it passed. Now bone was clad in muscle, and muscle in skin. There was no blood, no slime. The only sign of moisture was the sparkle in her eyes.
It was the girl from the plaza. Naked, perfect, not a mark on her.
Her lips formed into a scowl; her brow tightened in a frown.
She was alive.
The girl stepped forward, as if the confining cylinder had never existed, and spoke to the servomech. Sam couldn’t understand the language, but she did not sound pleased.
“B-but . . .” Sam stuttered, “she wasn’t real. She was only an illusion—”
The servomech gave a mechanical chuckle. “You do have a very simplistic notion of reality. The girl in the plaza was virtual, as was the plaza. But the virtual woman was modeled on what, in your terms, is a real one. This is she.”
“When you two have finished discussing me as if I am a thing, I would appreciate some clothing,” said the girl. By now Sam’s translator had kicked in. Her accent reminded him of home. The servomech produced a lightweight robe from its interior and passed it to her. She arranged it about herself.
“Why have I been incorporated?” she demanded. “I did not ask to be incorporated. One moment I am taking part in a Galaxy-wide celebration of patterned plainsong to the Lifesoul-Cherisher; the next, I am standing naked in an abattoir, being stared at by a gawking dimwit.”
“His name is Fourteen Samuel Godwin’sson Travers,” the servomech informed her. “He is a servant of Unity, undergoing urgent training as a lifesoul-healer, as ordained by the ecclesiarchs.”
The girl’s demeanor improved abruptly. “That changes the circumstances.” She adjusted her robe—displacement activity to calm her anger. “I am the Lady Nerryd, formerly of the Tidal Crescent in the bailiwick of the Campestrality on the tribute world of Yud. And since we are not wed, you should not have looked upon me unclothed.”
But Sam was in no state for polite conversation. The transformation from dead meat to living woman had left his mind in turmoil. How was this possible? Was it yet another layer of illusion?
“Forgive him, lady; he is suffering from shock,” the servomech apologized on Sam’s behalf.
“Has he also lost his tongue?”
At that moment, it would not have surprised Sam to find that her words were literally true. Body parts were transient possessions in Heaven, it seemed. But he pulled himself together sufficiently to gasp an awkward apology. Nerryd was reluctantly mollified. With her grudging permission, Sam reached out and touched her. She seemed real.
What did that prove, though? Sam wrenched his brain back into gear. The servomech’s demonstration of the tenuous nature of reality was over. He couldn’t spend the rest of this life doubting his senses. And he was starting to understand how the miracle might have been accomplished. “Nanotech?” he asked the robot.
“Better. Femtotech. Recursive nanotechnology, Fourteen Samuel. It takes complex macroscopic machinery to manufacture rudimentary nanomachines. But with the hypercomplex macromachines that we have devised, it is possible to make complex nanomachines. And those, in turn, can build rudimentary femtomachinery.”
“It took seconds!”
“Yes, the slowness of the incorporation procedure is a cause for concern,” said the servomech, misunderstanding Sam’s emphasis. “The time required to incorporate all fifteen billion lifesouls here would be unacceptably long if for some reason it became necessary to evacuate this world. But until we can make the step to complex femtomachines and rudimentary attotechnology, it is the best we can manage.”
“Are you two going to leave me standing here while you talk about toys, or is someone going to tell me why I am here?”
“Further apologies, lady,” said the servomech. “It became essential for Fourteen Samuel’s education that he should ask a few questions of a discorporate.”
“Then why did you not leave me discorporate and link him to me virtually?”
“He mistrusts anything that he experiences in virtuality. He does not consider it sufficiently real.”
Nerydd gave Sam a withering look. “It is real enough to the lifesouls of Heaven! Does he doubt the evidence of his own senses?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “When what they report is virtual. For all I know, none of this is real. I’ve already been fooled once.”
“For all you know,” the servomech affirmed, “everything you have experienced in your entire life may have been unreal. The best you can do is assume that such an elaborate simulation would not have been worth the trouble.”
“You said he wanted to question a discorporate,” Nerydd reminded them. “Then let him ask his questions, and then return me forthwith to my plainsong.”
“I’m not sure I need to ask,” said Sam. “I think that your words have already shown me where I’ve been making a mistake.”
“Which was?”
She looked so desirable . . . “That . . . that you would prefer this reality to the illusion of Heaven.”
Nerydd stared at him, thunderstruck. “Are you mad?”
“No. But I think you may be.”
“Huh! Five minutes ago I was contributing to the harmony of the cosmos. Now I’m standing in a slaughterhouse, discussing the nature of reality with an idiot.”
“But this slaughterhouse—this discorporation facility—is real,” Sam protested. Achingly beautiful as Nerydd might be, she seemed unable to grasp an entirely obvious idea. “The celebration of plainsong is only a mirage in your mind, inserted by machines. Do you honestly prefer that to the real world? If you rejected the virtual, there would be no need for the slaughterhouse.”
“You have it exactly back to front! Without the slaughterhouse, there would be no Heaven. And when I am in the virtual world of Heaven, it is the reality, and there is no slaughterhouse.”
“Yes, there is! You just aren’t aware of it.”
“You were unaware of my plainsinging.”
It was a verbal trap. Wasn’t it? “That’s not the same.”
“How can you be sure? Perhaps you should join me in my choir. Then”—she moved her hips seductively and gave him a predatory smile—“you could get to know me better and learn to appreciate my point of view.”
Cherisher, it’s tempting. Instant Heaven. But Sam managed to resist. A quick glance at his surroundings was enough. “Even though we are not wed?” he inquired, a sparkle in his eye.
“That could be arranged . . . No, I was joking. The offer wasn’t serious. You’re not my type.”
“You are mine,” said Sam wistfully. “That is why the machines selected you.” A thought struck him. “You seem far too young and healthy to be suitable material for Heaven. I thought that discorporation was a medical procedure reserved for those that could not be healed in any other way.”
“Not on a world that has reached closure in the Church,” said the servomech. “When that occurs, all citizens are discorporated, whatever their physical condition might be. However,” he addressed Sam, “you have your answer. Your presumption was wrong. The lady wishes to return immediately to her virtual paradise. Your alleged ‘reality’ holds no attraction for her.”
“I want to be discorporated!” shouted Nerydd. “Now!”
Unnoticed, a shadow had slid across the ground where they stood. Suddenly aware that something was blocking the light, she looked up—and screamed. Before the servomech could stop her, Nerydd was stumbling through the racks of body parts, terrified out of her wits. But she was running the wrong way.
A gigantic shape blotted out the light from above. The servomech seized Sam by the arm and began to drag him away from the scene. “It is a levithon!” the robo
t cried. “We cannot stay, or you will be killed! Nothing organic can survive its attack!”
“What about Nerydd?” Sam yelled, wondering what a levithon was but realizing this was not a good moment to ask.
“She must take her chances among the organ racks,” said the servomech. “She is beyond our help.”
Despite the danger, Sam dug his feet in, and the robot ground to a halt. Behind them, Nerydd had slipped and fallen; she was trying to dig her way into a heap of glutinous yellow mush. “That will not save her,” the servomech remarked. “Nothing now will save her.”
“We should have left her in her Heaven!” Sam shouted as the huge, pale shape sank lower. Cherisher, but it’s big.
“She would still have died,” said the servomech. “Her tissues were stored in this vicinity. A levithon attack costs many lives. The scavengers leave nothing where they have been, just a bare patch of ground. Cold ground, frozen solid by the levithon’s metabolism.”
Only later would Sam observe that this remark demolished the robot’s view that reality was negotiable. The virtual reality of Heaven was constrained by the external world, just as a mind becomes constrained by its material brain if its owner’s head hits a rock. Now he was too horrified to think of anything beyond survival.
The servomech dragged him toward the nearby building and through a low doorway. Looking back, Sam saw that the levithon’s pallid bulk had smothered Nerydd’s noisome refuge, along with the entire area where they had been standing only a few seconds earlier.
To the accompaniment of obscene sucking noises, the levithon settled down to feed. Sam couldn’t take his eyes off the scene. But he was glad when the robot shut the door.
11
TALITHA, AQUIFER ORBIT
Some say that emergence occurs when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But greater, sum, and part are quantitative concepts. Emergence, like meaning, is a quality. You cannot count a quality. You have to experience it.