by John Clute
The screen came to life.
‘O most honourable Freer, merchant adventurer to the stars,’ spoke Mamselle Cunning Earth Link, her black-and- white image flickering on the tiny screen. She spoke through an ambient buzz. ‘I pray fulsome,’ she continued, in a tone of formal import, ‘that the following small narrative comes to you after we have gained biggish accord.’
In Glass Island, Mamselle in the life turned her head down shyly.
On the screen, menus with tidy arms pointed to her home planet in the centre of vision, Twenty-five Million Heartbeats ago (maybe more!), and her tinny recorded voice began to speak again. It was a fair planet (crackled the voice), only a few dozen parsecs up the Spiral Clade from Tile Dance's present position. Just after these shots were taken, the Eolhxir planet suffered an occlusion of plaque as virulent and sudden as that which had long before devastated Human Earth. The only mobile survivors of this disaster had been off-planet at the time their home seized up, most of them resident in non-Insort-Geront arks.
‘Just nice retirement homes!’ pealed the voice through static. ‘Gated communities! Revolving malls, new stock daily! Gimme caps for all! Disappointment Addiction Management Utopia for elderly katzenjammers in polished shorts, shopping-for-life! Pure quill disneys! A greenhouse for breeding, we being topiary parthogenetes, as I surmise you must have massively guessed long since by now.’
—We had, murmured KathKirtt into Freer’s head.
A sequence of shots showed the species surviving, venturing into the beehive trapezoid of known stars as waif biota, drifting up and down the tropics for several Billion Heartbeats, trading data for food, washing dishes, establishing hardscrabble colonies here and there, on planets otherwise deserted. No flora, no fauna, no pack-drill. No life, no tribute!
‘Such servitude brought us to the term of our tether, like homo sapiens before the bigthink retirement arks, such a scoop! Such a clever homo sapiens notion! Get rich quick! To think that savant-class members of your species, effulgent sophont, created fast-lane Care Consortia! That Insort Geront is toi! An inspiration to us all.’
Freer began to heat.
Mamselle’s head shrank.
‘So we thought,’ said Mamselle on the screen, ‘that it might be brilliant scheme to hightail it down-galaxy and inhabit the light, where the data is smooth as silk sheets, streets of gold! Effete neat dancing foots fantastic! Wheat feet in the corn! Light out for the Territory! Moolah for the worthy Eolhxir! So we send cohort of our ilk deep south of west. But nay, O sophont, nay, do not think we durst venture all the way downthroat into hotdamn capo di tutti capi land, into big head of light-ville. Plenitude scalds! Droves! Droves of light driven!’
—Plenitude scalds? whispered a mask as though it had ingested a big new meme, its mouth bigger than its belly, —nay not so.
‘But still they come too close, like Icarus, our ilk, they fly too close to the jingle bells of light!’ proclaimed Cunning Earth Link in the life, and tapped her breasts, causing them to rattle in a brief formal tattoo.
‘The stings are strings of light,’ thrummed KathKirtt.
‘Apt putting, O ship Mind, O great declination of agape to hither and thithering shores of flesh!’ pealed Earth Link, and fell silent, but only for an instant.
‘Outcome of such a daring descent?’ spoke the voiceover. ‘You might ask! Alas! A woebegone assbackwards skedaddle was their doom, O sophonts, upback nowabouts herewards upside downside into dark-scored thickets of Eaten Lands, homeless still, marsh-gas seasonal effect depressive syndrome gnawing ex-pioneer hearts, drifting random, drifting darkwards up lontanati trails all be-choked with star-vines like dust — Book quote! — so very unused were they.
‘But lo! yonder a bump!
‘An empty planet! Uncharted! Liveable! Verdant grots! Plots for cots in grots! Nix gridlocks! Deep pools of silence for a beestung rabble to regroup! Eolhxir! they dubbed it, honouring our own dead world. And here were decimated mercilessly absolutely nix autochthones I swear! An empty planetoid adrift, concluded the cohort of our ilk. Utterly utterly! Eden for a winter’s nap. Until . . .’
Freer stopped the presentation.
‘Were the lenses already there?’ he said, in a voice so quiet that Glass Island shaped around it.
Mamselle’s head nodded.
Freer activated the television set again.
‘Species-protective gene-honed wisdom forbids — big spanking! — that we donate holus bolus starchart location of beloved Eolhxir natch?’ continued the voice-over. ‘Big spank!’
The planet flashed on to the screen, behind a translucent scrim through which no stars could be seen, nor any surface details, beyond a vague impression of a complexity of contours, which implied that land masses were predominant. Eolhxir lay at the centre of the screen like a jewel in velvet. Facets of light glittered through the scrim; menus identified them as settlement points. Other icons traced exploration patterns, during the execution of which (murmured the Mamselle voice-over) the new inhabitants discovered that the planet was not empty after all. From the rivulet-bearded hills to the west of the furthest search pattern, something that was not empty soon began to fill the well of silence, began to hypnopomp the cohort of her ilk down aisles of dream to something. Something that seemed to have been activated, or alerted, by the Eolhxir landing. Instruments began to overload with not quite decipherable messages of wrath and beseechment: these messages were deafening, in a sense; but they were not in any sense acoustic. They entered the sensorium as light. There was considerable panic sprouting in the cohort of the ilk.
‘Upside-down palaces of light!’ ululated Mamselle, crackling through the television speakers. ‘The Eolhxir began perforce to ruminate: that a terrible source of light lurked inside the mountains dragon-like! Not placable!’
It was as though the centre of the galaxy dwelled at the root of the mountains.
The cohort of her ilk were unable to penetrate further than the surly piedmont that skirted the central peaks, and only reached that far by riding shielded sigilla which, heavy with instrumentation, were able to bring them some way into the hills, following traceries of input up a narrow valley (icons flickered; a close-up showed a vague impression of heights and depths). There, safely ensconced in a system of caves, and insulated by rainbow layers of cold-dark-matter, the sigilla riders found a storage cache, almost certainly of Predecessor vintage, and guarded by a horde of sting-bots, which cost a few hundred sigilla to anaesthetise. Inside the cache, in hierarchical arrays, the sigilla riders found artefacts whose function they could not then decipher: millions of almost intolerably hot, microscopic, lenticular ovoids, quiescent but clearly rousable, waiting to be used, perhaps.
On the screen toons danced suddenly, arrows flickered around a holographic manifestation of a peeled lens, peeling it like an onion. Within, this lens seemed almost like an eye, unblinking and very bright; or a mouth which was a sun. The heart of the lens became brighter and brighter, an increase of intensity which the display began to register in a sidebar, so as not to blind viewers.
The display progressed, the mouth which was a sun seemed to gape and fibrillate, almost as though it were choking on something. And then, suddenly, the lens burned out, became ashen, as though it had shuttered itself away, though the mouth did not close, remained open, gaping like an abandoned shell on a stony beach.
‘What’s happening?’ said Freer.
Mamselle’s claws made a clicking scissors sound.
‘It beseemed us to give shuttered ones a name,’ she continued softly. ‘When a lens crusts over, the Eolhxir give it the name of Leaden Heart, sophont.’
—Leaden Hearts, murmured KathKirtt in a bemused choir voice, as though something were evading the central circuits, as though the Made Mind had suffered something like déjà vu.
The Eolhxir cohort had a primitive translator, which soon infiltrated the simple sting-bot distributed group Mind, ploughed it for information topology. Once critical path had been gained, the t
ranslator homed in on the instructions matrix, which turned out to have been laid down in a Predecessor code for infant races, and which described the primary function of the lenses — as far as the translator was able to understand with its small brain. Lenses were data sorters which operated at ftl speeds, so that in a very real sense lenses were bigger inside than out: a fulldimensional still schematic of their interiors could do nothing but parody the reality inside, but in terms of such a schematic each lens was constructed like a million-layered onion lubricated within a quark-gluon plasma-bath. Each layer of the onion communicated with all other layers through the weavings of a trillion wormholes biting their tales, or so the schematic rendered a reality 3D visuals could not encompass. Nor could the schematic show that each of the trillion wirings of layer to layer within a lens was storyshaped, that the myriad interconnections within a lens attended to what might happen next.
‘The attentive wormhole, the wormhole ouroboros,’ cackled Mamselle. ‘Like crones! Pardon! Pardon!’
Each lens was capable of network-swapping at a level previously undreamed of. If enough lenses had been linked into one circuit, or so the cohort of the ilk implied in their call for help up-galaxy to Westron, they’d have mapped the Big Bang.
Enough lenses in harness could remember anything.
But this was not all.
There was also the question of filth.
When an addressable (i.e. story-shaped) datum passed down a trillion ‘threads’ through the sorting apertures which made up the surface of the lens, that datum would suffer translation into a path or photism, braided together with any sibling data that might be awaiting convoy status, and sent on its way down alleyways and gates through labyrinthine ways into its final (for this operation) slot, leaving footprints of filth all the way down. These footprints were the marks of the world, and signalled that the molasses-thick pancake makeup of the outer phenomenal world had successfully been debrided, that the datum had now been washed in the chalice of the lens, had become a datum-become-path and was now passing onwards, through any of a trillion orifices on the lens surface, braided with its siblings into almost immeasurably large skeins of sense, clean as a whistle.
Once braided, a datum was as clean as light from the Big Bang: a path which glowed, cast illumination, opened again the occluded veins of the universe, did not lie.
Of course it was never a single datum, never a single family of data; it was teraflops of data transactions every measurable instant.
Lenses, in other words, ate plaque.
Lenses were light-bringers to the Eaten Lands.
A consort of lenses could handle more data than an entire sublight Insort Geront ark crammed with fresh retirees sleeping the sleep of the just, feeding their neurons and axons into distributed networks for information storage and transfer. But arks were chip. They were inherently filthy. Every chip transaction increased the entropy of the universe; arks, which focused untold trillions of chip transactions every Heartbeat, littered the universe with filth.
• • •
The tape had ended.
The television set from Human Earth sat blank. Freer gestured, and it sank back into the floor.
‘And the lens remembers each path!’ pealed Cunning Earth Link in the flesh. ‘Like you, holy Vipassana! Like Norns! Lenses know where datum was, where datum is, where datum’s bound. Until, lamentoso, something happens of a dire wrongness. They overload, burn out, lo. Headstones! Leaden Hearts: the last words being inscribed within them becoming words of exile, microcosms of the Eaten Lands, O weep for Adonais, per poet in Universal Book. Ashy,’ she intoned, ‘hecatombs of the rouged dark.’
The heartbeat of Tile Dance did not falter.
Teardrop was quiet.
Freer nodded to Mamselle in a moved way.
‘So our ship comes in? Wealth untold? Not. Not not.’
—They burn, do they not, hummed the ship Mind. The KathKirtt masks pinwheeled in the darkened command centre.
‘They burn, O beacon incarnate! O peepshow scoop of the great noosphere! Burn out jackstraw brainpans of Eolhxir. Burn with light. We cannot abide the burn. They burn like you, Freer sirrah, but ever ever so much more. Flamboyant lenses! They burn like an appalling smell.’
Mamselle Cunning Earth Link’s breast prostheses shivered.
‘Pardon!’
‘Go on, mamselle,’ said Kath, and a mask stopped spinning to flash a naked smile. ‘None of us is sensitive about the smell of homo sapiens.’
‘Gratulations!’ said Cunning Earth Link.
‘So,’ said Freer, ‘when did the cohort of the ilk call for help? Did they send sample lenses at the same time? Am I correct in assuming this is your first trip to Eolhxir? Do you really know the way, Mamselle Route-Only?’
‘Only a Heartbeat ago, incisive male! came the call for help. Lenses packed neatly into torpedo. What to do! What to do!’
She paused. Her expression changed; she gave Freer the impression she was about to bite the bullet. ‘Pardon sophont! Pardon hero figure of great echolalia species of the light!’ she pealed. ‘We have hired you by a big trick.’
‘Ah? Go on.’
Freer could feel KathKirtt in his every pore, listening hard, listening teraflop.
‘You think you are nanoforge tote-that-barge, destination Eolhxir. True to point! But big point is we hire you for you! We want to hire you to spelunk!’
‘For lenses?’
‘Aye! We hire you to harvest lenses! In the palaces of light, downside inside Eolhxir, where we cannot go. But you homo sapiens guys drink light like water. You homo sapiens guys notoriously yclept chugalugs of galaxy! Far- famed tough skins, plus gold hearts! You spelunk like amaranth, unburnable by octaves of light tumbling, into stink of light, into roots of mountains gamboge, bring out Aladdin’s lenses in your hands, just like virgin homo sapiens maiden female walking fiery gauntlet in Romance of Human Earth, no burn, no sweat! No more coastal lugger make- work for mighty Tile Dance. Hauling soda pop! You, mighty Freer of Human Earth! Hammer of plaque! Chugalug of light! Hopeful monster! When I think homo sapiens I think: nail! Homo sapiens is species amoroso for a nail to hit. The nail is light . . .’
‘Stinky!’ chorused KathKirtt. ‘After all these years, at last! A species-amoroso job for toi! Only you can stand the smell!’
‘I long to gaze upon Eolhxir for the first time real soon,’ intervened amorously the transitus tessera. ‘I know the way, honest injun, sirrah.’
She removed two of her breasts. They were hollow. She handed one to Freer.
‘Brandy,’ she pealed. ‘Shall we seal our compact with a toast?’
—Kath? Kirtt? he vocalised. —Seems like a chance to get down-galaxy again?
—Death, hummed KathKirtt, —lies behind us.
—I take that as a yes.
A dozen masks of the Mystick Krewe nodded, foliated, flowered.
Freer raised his breast goblet to hers.
‘Sealed. Make it so. Let us drink to the light.’
They drank.
Seats had them sit.
The floor protruded nipples and they sucked.
‘So then,’ said Freer, ‘why did you leave me there? Down there in the heart of Trencher?’
‘I stayed until the sigilla burned. I was not there in person, of course. Not safe!’
‘Thanks.’
‘How could I presume to protect a hero-class homo sapiens phallus of Thor? Nay nay. Fatal to go that deep. Absence of light kills like too much!’
‘Could have been fatal for me, too. And for ten billion other flesh sentients.’
‘Hardly so! A quarter of the planet is homo sapiens, as you surely parse, sophont. Though I could not wish to be a homo sapiens awakening tomorrow in Trencher.’
‘I could not wish, mamselle, to be any flesh sapient awakening tomorrow in a crippled world.’
‘You make cruel homo sapiens joke, sirrah!’
‘I make no joke,’ Freer said softly.
Mam
selle’s head seemed to shrink.
—Shut up, Stinky, whispered KathKirtt basso like an echo of the deep engines of Tile Dance, which could always be heard, like blood shushing through the most intimate of capillaries.
Suddenly Mamselle was bathed in a swarm of butterfly masks, and her tiny eyes could be seen to glaze over. Her chair enclosed her.
—She can doze for a moment, Stinky.
—What’s going on?
—We need to update you about plaque. We do not know why the relevant data were unavailable to us off-tropic and down-galaxy, or to Kirtt solo when he was disabled to confirm to Law Well. We are engaged upon the task of finding out: it is a maze. But we know this much. While you were beachcombing the million suns of the gold-horned west, something happened up here. There is plaque everywhere, more virulent than before, something new. There are seizures daily. Like Trencher. We were not so far down the clade of time that voices could not carry to us, but only untruths were conveyed. The news was shaped.
Outside the Law Well remits, throughout the dense trapezoid of stars inhabited by flesh sentients known to one another, data shaping was the greatest sin. Data shaping was theft. Tile Dance seemed to beat with rage around Freer.
—Care Consortia . . . murmured Freer.
KathKirtt coughed like a huge midnight cat.
—Seemingly, they growled.
The krewe of KathKirtt calmed slowly.
When a planet is hit by plaque nowadays, they said at last, the consequences are graver than any chaos episode, more intense than some overloaded ark spasm. Plaquing is no longer a blight restricted to Made Minds. The more virulent plaque seizures jump the gap. Plaque eats flesh sapients too, Stinky. Of their brains are coral made, which is what happens when panic fixes into the mind. They go golem. On the morning of the plaque seizure on Trencher, nothing will be left but golems reiterating the ruts of that which seized them, like cuckoo clocks (Kirtt said), like hieroglyphs (Kath said), until they starve. Uncanny (they cried)!