House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Any sign of Doctor Meninx?’ I asked, having just whisked up-ship from the propulsion chamber.

  ‘Still asleep, or whatever he gets up to in that tank of his,’ Purslane said.

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Isn’t it.’

  Hesperus made a series of complex gestures, breaking his battalion into countless little divisions. Purslane pouted as they overran her forces, swarming amongst her men like rampaging insects. A little flag waved from a smoke-girdled summit. I thought of Count Mordax’s Ghost Soldiers, storming the Kingdom on their pale, bony horses.

  ‘Looks like he’s beaten you again,’ I said.

  ‘He always does,’ Purslane said, leaning away from the table. ‘I asked him to play down to my level, but he won’t.’

  ‘I would rather defeat you than insult you,’ Hesperus said. ‘Besides, the game is good practice for my memory. I have improved my short-term faculties since we last spoke, Campion.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Purslane rose and stroked a finger against the side of my cheek. ‘That’s enough fun and games for me, anyway. You and I have work to do.’

  ‘The strands,’ I said, with as little enthusiasm as I could muster.

  ‘We can’t put it off much longer. I really ought to whisk back to Silver Wings and start work on my side of the story.’

  Putting it off for as long as possible was exactly what I had hoped to do. We were two days out from Ateshga; two hundred and two days after he had bowed to our requests. Thanks to Hesperus, the work had been completed more than satisfactorily. Dalliance was humming along at a whisker below the speed of light.

  ‘I shall not detain you from whatever business you must attend to,’ Hesperus said. ‘But might I ask a question, Campion?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It concerns your guest.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of guests, thanks to Ateshga.’

  ‘I am referring to Doctor Meninx.’

  ‘I thought you might be. Is there a problem with him?’

  ‘I do not think Doctor Meninx cares for my presence on this ship. Is that a fair assessment of his feelings?’

  I tried to shrug off his question. ‘I can’t say what’s going on his head.’

  ‘If I did not know better, I would say that he is a Disavower. That is one of the things I do remember. The Disavowers do not believe that machines have any right to be considered sentient. In their most extreme manifestation, they would seek to eradicate machine intelligence from the galaxy.’

  ‘I don’t think Doctor Meninx is quite that far down the road.’

  ‘Give him time,’ Purslane murmured.

  ‘But he is a Disavower?’ Hesperus asked.

  ‘I don’t think he’s really serious about it,’ I evaded. ‘The Lines don’t have much truck with Disavowers. Gromwell wouldn’t have brought the doctor to our reunion if he suspected Meninx was a paid-up machine hater.’

  ‘Given the manner in which he has been delayed, one suspects that Doctor Meninx has decided that Gentian policy is no concern of his. Might he now be allowing his mask to slip?’

  ‘The doctor had some misgivings about letting you aboard. They weren’t specifically to do with you being a Machine Person, rather that you were an unknown quantity.’

  ‘I see,’ Hesperus said, as if my answer had told him a great deal more than I had intended.

  ‘Really, it’s not that big a deal. You don’t have to see each other if you don’t want to. It’s not as if he poses you any kind of threat.’

  ‘That is not my fear. I merely wish to establish cordial relations with your guest, in the hope that talking to him might shed light on some corner of my memory as yet unilluminated. Purslane told me that the doctor is a scholar, on his way to an engagement. That struck a chord with me, as if our trajectories might be similar.’

  ‘The doctor was on his way to the Vigilance,’ I said.

  ‘The Vigilance,’ Hesperus echoed, as if testing the sound of the word. ‘I know of this, although I cannot say why. What became of his engagement?’

  ‘Nothing. It wasn’t possible to deliver him to them without throwing me off-schedule for the reunion.’ I forced a half-smile. ‘Look on the bright side, though: if I hadn’t let down Meninx, I’d never have met you.’

  ‘And I would still be a prisoner of Ateshga.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Then Doctor Meninx’s misfortune is my great good luck, I suppose. I should like to know more of this Vigilance, Campion: now that the word has been spoken, it feels like a key to unlocking more of my buried memories. I am even more anxious to discuss my predicament with the doctor.’

  ‘I can tell you all about the Vigilance,’ I said. ‘I was there. Would you like to see my trove?’

  ‘That would be very kind indeed,’ Hesperus said.

  Seen from outside, as I braked down from interstellar speed, the Vigilance was a hole punched in the pale shimmer of the Milky Way, where it transected the Norma and Cygnus Arms. In infrared it was the hottest thing for a thousand lights, blazing out like a beacon. Visible light photons from the star at the heart of the Vigilance had been downgraded to heat, seeping out in all directions. Somewhere in between, they had given up much of their energy to the Vigilance’s ceaseless information-gathering and archiving activities. The star was the engine in the basement of the library, a machine for turning hydrogen into data.

  The Vigilance exists around a solar-type star with about a billion years left on the Main Sequence, or until a wormhole must be sunk into its core for refuelling. Once upon a time, that star almost certainly had a full arsenal of planets, moons, asteroids and comets, but none now remain. Every useful atom in the system has been reorganised into the component bodies of a Dyson swarm, numbering about ten billion in total. The Priors knew how to smash worlds and reforge their remains into the unbroken shell of a true Dyson sphere. Humans can do the smashing part, but all efforts to construct a shell of the necessary rigidity have failed. The best we can do is to englobe a star in a swarm of bodies moving on independent orbits, like flies buzzing around a lantern.

  At fifty hours from the outer boundary, I transmitted an approach request and identified myself as Gentian. There was no response. I slowed down to system speed and made a further series of approach requests. I was doing everything by the book, following the wise counsel of the trove. The distance narrowed to a handful of hours. I slowed again, to the point where it would take me a year of flight to cross the remaining distance. Save for brief catnaps, I stayed awake and alert for the entire time, not even allowing myself a dose of Synchromesh. Slowly that black sphere enlarged until it was swallowing half my sky, its horizon so flat it felt as if I had reached the wall at the end of the universe. At three light-seconds, the Vigilance deigned to notice me.

  It was, technically speaking, an attack. The scalding energies that twinkled against Dalliance were enough to ablate metres of her hull before the impasse rose to full effectiveness. I had not run with the impasse raised because that would be construed as an approach with hostile intentions. As far as the Vigilance was concerned, this was no more than a polite challenge. They were simply testing my seriousness, determining whether or not I was someone it was worth doing business with.

  It should have been enough that I had survived the challenge, but the Vigilance saw fit to up its entry criteria several times before I reached the swarm’s surface. Escalating energies rained against my shields, stressing them to their limit. Those concentrated defence systems could have destroyed me many times over were I judged a real threat. I had been toyed with, teased, no more than that.

  Presently a door opened. The orbits of thousands of the outer bodies had been adjusted so that a dark tunnel formed in the swarm, arrowing deep into its heart. My nervousness peaked. As the door sealed behind me, I was vulnerable to attack from all angles. As I fell deeper, the bodies of the swarm blocked off any view of open space. Dalliance reported that the space around us was cr
ackling with information flow. The main beams were being routed around us, but occasionally a photon or two would ricochet off a stray grain of dust into Dalliance’s sensors.

  The spheres were artificial worlds, the largest of them tens of kilometres across and the smallest not much larger than Dalliance. Each was dark and smooth, their surfaces uninterrupted save for the circular apertures of signalling antennas. According to the trove, the spheres held concentric levels of processing machinery, wrapped around a fist-sized kernel of quark matter. Levators toiled to keep each node from crumpling in on itself. Data was organised in the layers according to reliability and access-frequency. Data of high provenance, or which seldom needed amending, was concentrated in the safe, stable depths of the quark kernels. It was troublesome to read in and out, but immune from accidental change or deletion, and safe against even a local supernova. Suspect or volatile data was kept in the intermediate and outer shells, occasionally shuffling higher or lower as it was reclassified. New data was fed in from the outside under the painstaking supervision of the Vigilance’s curators. Very few living souls had ever seen one of those strange, slow creatures. It was presumed that there were at least as many curators as there were bodies in the swarm, but since the curators hardly ever needed to travel either within the swarm or beyond it, their true number could not be ascertained.

  I had consulted the troves, but all they had told me was that there were many theories about the curators, and that few of the accounts could be reconciled with each other. The Vigilance thrived on collating information, but by the same token it seemed mischievously keen to spread misinformation about itself.

  I was thinking about that, wondering what chip of dubious value I would add to the mosaic, when fields snared Dalliance and brought her to a halt relative to one of the larger bodies in the swarm. We had fallen about halfway into the shell: the light of the star was beginning to bleed through the‘floor’ of swarm bodies below me, its yellow-white brilliance diminished to a deep, brooding scarlet.

  A voice, more ancient than old-growth civilisations, deeper than time, slower than glaciers, boomed across the bridge in Trans. ‘State the purpose of your visit, shatterling.’

  I had rehearsed my answer countless times. ‘I have nothing to offer that is worthy of the Vigilance. I am here only to open my troves for your inspection, worthless though they are, and to pass on the goodwill and blessings of Gentian Line, the House of Flowers.’

  ‘Do you wish to access our archives?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, for one never lied to the Vigilance. ‘But I do not expect that access to be provided. As I said, I am here on a goodwill basis.’

  ‘Please wait,’ the voice rumbled, sounding like a distant landslide. ‘Your case is under referral.’

  I waited.

  I waited a week. Then a month. Then half a year. Then six and a half years. All the while, Dalliance was pinned in place, going nowhere.

  I was asleep when the voice boomed again, but I had taken precautions to have myself roused to full consciousness the instant anything happened.

  ‘You will be admitted into the node. No further action is required on your part at present.’

  One of the circular apertures in the swarm body revealed itself to be an irising door, wide enough for Dalliance to fit through. The fields cajoled my ship inside, prodded her down a narrowing shaft, then left her floating at the centre of a spherical holding bay. According to Dalliance’s inertial measurements - far from foolproof - we were still some distance from the centre of the swarm body. The walls around us were dimpled with smooth, perfectly round craters, the rims of which glowed arterial red. The fields had released their hold, but with the door closed behind me, there was nothing to do but wait.

  So I waited. Eleven and a half years this time.

  It may sound as if, to a shatterling, accustomed to crossing the galaxy in circuits lasting hundreds of thousands of years, eleven years is nothing. But our minds are not wired that way. Those eleven and a half years consumed lifetimes.

  But at the end of it all, I was joined by another presence. One of the craters irised open and a vehicle began to intrude into the holding bay. It was bulbous, with a dome-shaped prow connected to an ovoid hull, and various smaller ovoids branching off the hull. It was about six times smaller than Dalliance - seven or eight hundred metres from end to end. The technology was more primitive-looking than I had been expecting. The brassy brown hull had a corroded look to it in places, mottled and scarred in others, and there were crude mechanical connections running between the ovoid sections suggestive of the docking collars on primitive spacecraft. As it cleared the door, the ship began to tilt, turning its long axis through ninety degrees. It did this with great ponderousness, as if it moved to a different, slower physics than Dalliance. Some change occurred to the domed part of the hull, the opaque plating becoming milky and then translucent, as if smoke was clearing from behind a window. Behind the translucence loomed a complicated structure, some kind of leathery, biologically derived machinery ...

  The machinery was a face, looking out at me through the glass of a helmet. It was not human, but I could tell that it had been human, a long time ago. It was as if a face had been carved in a cliff and then subjected to aeons of weather, until the features were no more than residual traces. The eyes alone were ten metres across; the face ten times as wide. The mouth was a dark and immobile crevasse in the granite texture of the creature’s grey-tinged flesh. The nose, the ears, were no more than worn-away mounds on the side of a hill. The head swelled at the neck and vanished into a huge body concealed by the connecting ring around the base of the domed helmet.

  The eyes blinked. It was less a blink than the playing out of an astronomical event, like the eclipse of a short-period binary. It took minutes for the lids to close; minutes again for them to ooze open. The eyes were looking at me, but there was no focus in them, no hint of animation.

  The figure drifted closer. From one side of the hull, a string of jointed ovoids became a grasping arm with fingers at the end. The fingers were as large as trees. They closed around Dalliance, and I felt their tips clang against the hull. The ship, sensing my mood, was wise enough not to take retaliatory action.

  It turned out that the curator was only interested in touch. Over the course of several hours, he ran his hand along Dalliance, cupping and stroking her, as if he needed reassurance that she was not a phantasm. Then he slowly pulled back.

  The voice, which I had not heard for more than eleven years, boomed again. It was as if no time at all had passed for the curator. ‘There is just the one of you, shatterling. You have come alone.’

  ‘It’s the way we travel, except when we have guests. Thank you for letting me come this far.’

  The giant being’s face registered no change when I was being spoken to, but I had no doubt that I was being addressed by the curator. Whatever functions that mouthed served, the creation of language was not one of them.

  The creature floated where it was, perfectly still save for the occasional blink of those monstrous, pond-like eyes. It blinked about once an hour.

  ‘You have been very patient, shatterling.’

  ‘It was told that patience would be necessary, curator.’ Aware of how easily the Vigilance could be angered, I felt as if each word I uttered was a grenade about to be thrown back in my face. ‘Is that the right term of address?’ I asked.

  ‘For you,’ the curator answered. ‘Do you have a name, other than Gentian shatterling?’

  ‘I am Campion,’ I told it.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Campion.’

  I gave it my potted life story. ‘I was born six million years ago, one of a thousand male and female clones of Abigail Gentian. My earliest memories are of being a little girl in a huge, frightening house. It was the thirty-first century, in the Golden Hour.’

  ‘You have come a long way. You have outlived almost all the sentient beings who have ever existed, including the Priors.’

  �
�I’ve been very, very lucky. Lucky to have been born into Gentian Line, lucky to have been able to live through so much time without experiencing more than a fraction of it.’

  ‘To live through deep time would be considered unfortunate?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, rather that I’m carrying a brain not so very different from the ones humans had when we were still hunter-gatherers. There are some modifications that help me process memories and the strands of my fellow shatterlings, but Abigail never touched the deep architecture. Our minds just aren’t engineered to experience that much time in the raw.’

  ‘You would go mad.’

  ‘I’d need help.’

  ‘You must wonder how we have coped. It is known that curators are very old, very long-lived. Unlike you, unlike the late Rimrunners, we do not have the luxury of time-dilation to make the centuries fly past.’

  ‘You appear to be managing well enough.’

  ‘You would presume to know?’

  ‘The mere continued existence of the Vigilance is evidence that you have overcome the difficulties of extreme longevity. No other stellar-based culture has endured as long.’

  ‘There would be no point in the Vigilance if it was ephemeral. Our watch is a long and lonely one. We always knew it would require great patience; a willingness to take the long view.’

  ‘Are you as old as the Vigilance?’

  ‘That would make me more than five million years old, shatterling.’

  ‘I’m nearly six.’

  ‘Except you aren’t, really. You were born that long ago, but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?’

  ‘That’s an apt analogy, curator.’

  ‘For me to be as old as the Vigilance, I would need to have endured all those years. That would make me one of the most ancient organisms in the galaxy.’

  ‘For all I know, you may be.’

  ‘I am not the oldest curator, but I am still growing. All of us are. In the dawn of our kind we found a pathway to biological immortality that depends on continued growth. There are other pathways, but this is the one we settled upon.’