House of Suns (38 page)

When the process was done, the man discarded his old body as it was no longer useful to his needs. He could still puppet an organic nervous system when circumstances required it, but they were few and far between. He preferred to interact with the abstract realm of simulated experience, only rarely bothering to communicate with the people he had left behind in the outside world. They bored him now - their habits of thought seemed painfully predictable, as if their minds were running on tramlines. He felt different, like a fish that had flopped onto dry land and found that it could still breathe, while everyone else was still stuck in the ocean. He had nothing in common with them now.

For centuries Valmik’s artificial mind existed in a fixed architecture, in a fixed location. There were copies of him scattered through the Golden Hour and beyond its civilised fringes, but they were only to be activated in the event of damage to or the demise of the primary mind. Over time, he had added to his complexity - integrating more and more artificial neurones into his mind, until they exceeded the number of functional cells in his original brain by a factor of many hundreds. By then he was so far from human that his only useful companions were other ascended minds. For a while, they kept pace with him, until he began to ease ahead. They were too cautious, too unwilling to cast aside the last residual traces of human brain architecture. They clung to ancient wiring, archaic, hallowed arrangements of sensory and cognitive modules. The structure of the human mind was a thing that had evolved through accident and happenstance, layering each new addition over the old. It was like the house where I had been born, with corridors and staircases that led nowhere, neglected rooms and hallways that could not be enlarged because they were hemmed in by others, plumbing that was fiendishly, unnecessarily complex, because each new installation had had to be routed around a pre-existing tangle of rusty pipes and drains. The others did not have the courage to sweep this jumbled, top-heavy heritage aside.

He did. He was braver, bolder, less afraid of losing himself.

He vowed to remake himself from the bottom up, reorganising his basic architecture from the very foundations of his mind. No part of his brain would be left unexamined. Knots would be straightened out; modules moved around or deleted entirely. Throughout this process, consciousness would endure. It would grow faint, as the changes reached their most radical phases, but it would never be entirely extinguished. The planning would need to be meticulous - like a surgeon groggy with his own anaesthetic, he would not be sufficiently clear-minded to intervene halfway through if something went amiss. All contingencies must be allowed for.

As it was, nothing went wrong. He just became something weirder, larger, faster than he had been before. The old mansion was now a shining, rationally organised edifice. He was pristine and efficient. Thoughts raced through him with blinding clarity. He looked back on what he had done to himself and saw that it was good. He saw also that he had left behind his old companions for ever. The process of improvement, of adjusting his architecture, continued unabated. Even if one of the others had a change of heart and decided to emulate what he had done, they would never catch up. He had become something unique, something that might not have existed since the Priors.

But Valmik was not finished. Although he was better than he had been - incalculably so - he was still bound to one location, locked in the processing core of a single machine. That machine, once its power source, outer layers and armour were taken into account, was as large as a small asteroid. In this era, long before the trivial secrets of spacetime, momentum and inertia were unlocked, it was about as easy to move around. He had to keep himself cool by boiling comets away to steam. He had become godlike in the private realm of his own mental processes, but he was still vastly, humblingly dependent on other machines and other human beings. If that flow of comets was interrupted, he would boil in his own brilliance. It would only take a single well-aimed weapon to destroy the machine in which he lived.

This was not good enough.

The change that he forced upon himself took him even further from humanity, but by now being human was a land mass on a very distant horizon, one that he would not mourn when it eventually slipped out of sight. Every one of the tens of thousands of billions of neurones that constituted his mind was allowed to become an independent machine, capable of taking care of its own survival. In those early days he still needed fuel and raw materials (he had not yet learned the simple trick of tapping vacuum for those basic nourishments) but the machines were clever and agile enough to find their own resources. Remaining in contact with each other via light, he became a cloud-consciousness, occupying a much larger volume than ever before. In fact, the cloud could swell as wide as he wished. If he wanted to englobe a planet, to wrap himself around it, that was no problem. The only price he paid was a slowing in his mental processes, as the light-speed lag between his components grew from microseconds to entire fractions of a second. Since there was nothing else in the universe he was interested in talking to except himself, this was not a pressing concern. He could even smear himself across an entire solar system, and beyond.

Long after the Golden Hour was a historical memory, long after the shatterlings had made their third reunion - those first three circuits encompassed a mere seven thousand years, since Abigail saw no sense in exploring more of the galaxy than had yet been colonised - the man had swelled to inhabit the Oort cloud, that halo of dormant comets orbiting between a thousand and a hundred thousand times as far from the Sun as the Old Place. Now the simplest thoughts consumed months of planetary time. The solar system whirred inside him like an over-wound clock.

Vast in size and number though he had become, Valmik was easy to miss. Because he played no part in human affairs, humans eventually forgot about him. There were stories about a thread of ghostly transmissions webbing the Oort, but no one took them any more seriously than a million other myths. When explorers stumbled on one of his elements, they normally assumed it was a piece of space junk from the dawn of the expansion. He sacrificed it anyway. He was incapable of being hurt, or even inconvenienced, by any imaginable human agency. Even the growing power of the Lines caused him no qualms.

But the Sun might be a problem. In the decelerated frame of his consciousness, the end of its main sequence lifetime lay only a few thousand subjective years away. This was intolerable. Something might be done about it in the distant future, when the Lines or some other human civilisation had learned the rudimentaries of stellar life-prolongation. But he could not count on that, and he would need to start making provisions now, while he still had enough time to mull the possibilities.

The cloud-consciousness decided that it was time to become interstellar. Rather than gathering himself into a concentrated formation and launching himself towards another star - like a flotilla of ships, albeit in unthinkable numbers - he began to inflate himself, sending his neuronal elements in all directions. It took tens of thousands of years before any single element came within reach of another sun, for the individual parts of him moved much more slowly than the swift ships of the Lines. As he grew even more distended, so his thought processes slowed down by yet more orders of magnitude. Expanded into a cloud encompassing dozens of stars, his quickest thoughts ate decades of planetary time. But at last he was free from dependence on any one solar system.

At this point the information in the troves became sketchy and contradictory. It was not clear what had happened to the man for the next million years or so. One line of argument held that he had expanded himself to encompass a massive swathe of galactic space - swallowing hundreds of thousands of systems, across thousands of lights. By now the Lines were into their seventh, eighth or ninth reunions, depending on when they had started. The Golden Hour was a bright, brief moment in time, compressed like a mote of light seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There had been empires within him that had no idea he existed. But the price for such expansion was consciousness frozen to the point of death. It took millennia for him to formulate the simplest thought.

The other line of argument held that the man had never grown larger than a few tens of light-years across. After reaching the size of a decent nebula, and spending a few hundred thousand years in that state, he had decided that enough was enough; that he was ready to engage with human civilisation again, even if it was engagement on his own rather distant terms, even if that engagement meant shrinking himself down to a planetary scale. It was not so much of a hardship, for in the time of his expansion he had learned much about self-preservation. He no longer needed external energy sources. He had observed the early galactic wars of the protohumans and seen what their weapons could do. Provided he took precautions, provided he remained agile, nothing need trouble him again.

What the troves did agree on was that, one way or the other, the Spirit of the Air, the Fracto-Coagulation, was what remained of the man after another five and a half million years of existence. He had been on Neume for most of that time, since there was no phase of the planet’s recorded history that did not make reference to him in some shape or form. Sometimes he had been an elusive, near-mythical presence, hiding himself in obscure ways for centuries at a time before appearing fleetingly to confused and wary witnesses who were not always believed. At other times, he was a fixed presence in the atmosphere, like the metastable storm in a gas giant. He shunned some civilisations, destroyed others, and showed tolerance and forbearance to others. When the Scapers’ plans failed, he maintained Neume’s atmosphere in a breathable state. It was a kindness that cost him nothing. It would have been more trouble not to step on an ant, when Valmik had been human.

So the theories went. I did not really know how many of them I believed, but the story struck me as at least plausible in its details. If the Spirit did not have a machine origin - and it was axiomatic that no machine intelligence had arisen prior to the Machine People - then it could only have started with a human, or group of humans. Abigail Gentian had done a daring, audacious thing to herself - so had the other Line founders. Even at the time, there had been declaimers, critics who said that her plan was monstrous and dehumanising. She had ignored them, of course—I had my existence to thank for it. It would have been presumptuous to assume that no other individual was capable of such visionary thinking; such unflinching willingness to sail beyond the shores of fixed humanity.

The Spirit came closer, until it filled half the sky, and I discerned that the individual forms had many shapes and sizes. Most of them were no larger than insects, but the more substantial entities were flapping things like bats or birds, but with a distinct mechanical aspect to them: the blade-sharp wings were jointed to the rounded bodies by complex hinges, the eyeless bodies flickering with pastel colours and pricks of laser-sharp light. It required an effort of will to remind myself that this entity was not the product of robotic evolution, not some weird kin to the Machine People, but an intelligence that had begun existence in human form and only attained this awesome, weather-like state of being via the accumulation of incremental change over millions of years.

The Spirit danced and weaved, forming transient shapes in the manner of a three-dimensional kaleidoscope. The wind came in waves with each pulse of change. The sound of it was a mad, droning buzz, with extremes of pitch ranging from a subsonic tone that was felt more than heard, to a shrill keening that might shatter my skull at any moment. Purslane tightened her hold on me, and it occurred to me that I had seldom been this frightened, or been so utterly at the mercy of forces beyond my control. Suddenly the idea that we might help Hesperus by bringing him to this place began to seem ludicrous and childish, much as if we had bargained something precious against the existence of fairies. But we were committed now; there was no way off the platform save by the flier, which would not return for many hours.

The Spirit began to centre itself over the platform, so that instead of filling one half of the sky it became a storm of change roiling over us, with a band of clear air beneath it in all directions. In the roaring heart of the phenomenon I made out only blackness, a core of machines packed so tightly - even though they were all independent from each other - that no daylight was able to penetrate. That darkness was relieved only by the intermittent flicker of coloured lights as the numberless units communicated amongst themselves. I felt the lash of rain against my skin, even though there had not been a drop of moisture in the air until the Spirit’s arrival.

Now it began to descend towards us. My instinct was to crouch, but I knew this would be futile and forced myself to remain standing. I glanced at the sanctuary of the building, but we must both have had the same thought, for Purslane shook her head; we had come here to show our devotion to Hesperus, not to cower behind those walls, which were in any case likely to prove ineffective.

Purslane extended a hand towards the plinth. Above the roar she managed to say, ‘Let’s go there. Let’s show it why we’re here.’

I knew she was right. Still holding each other, we walked across the platform until we were only a few paces from where we had left Hesperus. He seemed to watch us. No glimmer of recognition showed in his eyes, but the lights in his head quickened for a few intervals, before dimming and slowing again. Now they appeared darker than they had even when we had placed him on the plinth.

The Spirit lowered further, until its outer edges blocked the sky in all directions, filtering the sunlight as if twilight had already fallen. The roar had now become almost intolerable, and the black core hung over us like a swallowing mouth. From the purple margin of that blackness, a vortex of machines began to curl down in an inquisitive fashion, whirling like debris caught in a twister. The vortex tapered to a questing extremity. The probe dangled over Hesperus without touching him, approaching and withdrawing on several occasions. It was impossible not to sense some great apprehension from the Spirit of the Air, for all its undoubted power. I wondered if in all its years of existence it had ever encountered a being comparable to Hesperus. Perhaps this was the first time it had sensed the presence of a being of similar complexity to itself, albeit of an entirely different embodiment and origin.