House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ I said, addressing the mute form, ‘but whatever this is, whatever you’re trying to tell me, I’m going to find out and act upon it. I promise you that.’

  I had expected no reaction, and there was none.

  PART THREE

  One day I learned the true and dire secret of my mother, and why our house was the way it was. It was after another of the little boy’s visits. I had come to both cherish and detest him, like a dark part of my own psyche. It had been a year and a half at least, maybe more, since I had inducted him into the mysteries of Palatial.

  He had become Count Mordax. It had required negotiating a series of mental stepping stones, each of which took up at least one afternoon’s session of the game. First he had inserted himself into the mind of a palace rider, who became a spy claiming to have knowledge of where the sorcerer Calidris was in hiding. The rider reached the Black Castle, where he was challenged but allowed entry because he was unarmed and in possession (so he claimed) of vital intelligence. He was seen by Count Mordax, but found that he could not effect the transfer into his mind. The game’s rules were Byzantine, and we had to work them out through trial and error. One rule, which had only gradually become apparent, was that one could only move into another character’s head if the move did not involve too big a jump in social status. A peasant could not swap into the head of a king, even if the king knelt down to kiss the peasant. But the peasant could get there by jumping into the head of a blacksmith, and then an armourer, and then an officer in the king’s guard, and so on - working their way up by discrete steps. Sometimes it would not be possible to change character between one session and the next, but that was all part of the game’s richly involving texture. It was difficult and slow, but because at each step one had access to the memories and personality of the inhabited character, it was seldom boring. More often than not, the superimposed personality was so dominant that one had to concentrate to maintain a plan that might have been sketched out three or four characters down the chain. For myself, I only occasionally ventured from the mind of the princess: hopping from time to time into the minds of her courtiers to make sure none of them was plotting against her. When I had discovered a potential traitor—a maid whose brother had been caught poaching on palace grounds and executed - I had her put to questioning by my master interrogator. She had perished before admitting her intention to kill me, but I remained certain of her guilt.

  By now, it was becoming clear that Palatial would never be authorised for mass production. The dozen or so prototypes, of which mine was one, would be all that ever existed. Although the details were sketchy, and reported to me mostly by the little boy, it was said that the games had begun to have an adverse and lingering effect on the mental states of the children who played them. Children were carrying over some of the memories and personality traits of their characters into the real world outside the green cube - even though the machine was supposed to erase these transient neural states as the players passed back through the portal. That was true for me - in Palatial the princess was as real as anyone I had ever known - more real, in some respects, since I had become her - but the moment I passed back into the wider volume of the playroom, she seemed to wither away, becoming no more animated than a drawing in a book. Her memories, which had been mine to sift through when I was in the game, melted away like a dream whose details I could not recapture upon wakening. I remembered the pleasures and frustrations of the game, I remembered the objectives and the status of play, but outside the green room it might as well have been a simple doll’s house.

  The combine was protected from lawsuits associated with the prototype versions of Palatial - the families had all signed waivers before being permitted to take part in the trials - but there would be no such protection if the game was mass produced and released into millions of homes in the Golden Hour. Even if only a fraction of the children suffered delusional episodes, the combine would be ruined.

  And so the game’s development was abandoned. The combine tried to take back the prototypes, but they were only partially successful. The children who had been exposed to them were now obsessed with Palatial, unwilling to surrender their right of entry into that fantasy land. A few families let the technicians dismantle the prototypes, but most of them - aided by the fact that the combine had no desire to court publicity - managed to hold on to their copies of the game.

  ‘They made it for war,’ the little boy told me as we stepped out of the green portal, back into the playroom. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘They made what for war?’

  ‘The game - Palatial.’ He still had something of Count Mordax about him - there was a haughty disregard in his voice, above and beyond his usual predilection for teasing. ‘It was for soldiers, the same ones your family helped to clone. They went inside Palatial and got memories of being in the war, even though they’d only just been grown. By the time they went into battle, they had as much experience and knowledge as if they’d been fighting for years.’

  I did not know much about the Conflagration - it was one of the subjects about which the story-cube was less than expansive - but I knew enough to be certain that sorcerers and ladies-in-waiting had not played a very significant role.

  ‘The Conflagration happened in space,’ I said. ‘There were no castles, or palaces.’

  The boy rolled his eyes. ‘That’s nothing, just details they put in at the end. Palatial wasn’t called Palatial when the soldiers were using it. When they went inside, they were in the solar system, in the Golden Hour, with ships and Lesser Worlds. All that fairy-tale stuff is what they turned the simulator into after the war, so they could still make money out of it. It didn’t work properly, they say - the soldiers kept forgetting who they were in the real world, getting stuck inside the game. I suppose they fixed that.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. The war was a horrible thing. That’s why no one talks about it.’

  ‘They don’t talk about it, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t making a profit out of it. You’ve seen the robots that come down the ramp with me. Scratch their armour and they’re not much different from the military robots we supplied to our side in the war.’

  The robots still unnerved me. In my dreams I sometimes found myself running down one of the house’s winding, mirror-lined corridors, with one of those sharp-clawed, slit-faced, mono-wheeled monstrosities gliding behind me, slowly but surely closing the gap. I wanted the Conflagration to belong to the past, buried safely in the back pages of history. I did not like the idea that it was still exerting an influence on the present, tapping fingers on the windows, waiting to be let back in again.

  ‘There aren’t any clones any more,’ I said. ‘Not if you don’t count the nannies.’

  ‘Slave labour that you can’t export into the Golden Hour. But my father says your household hasn’t forgotten any tricks since the armistice. If your side - or any side - needed clones again, your production lines wouldn’t take long to roll into action.’ With Count Mordax still lurking somewhere behind his eyes, he said mischievously, ‘It pushed your mother over the edge, what she ended up doing. It’s what made her mad. Or don’t you know about that?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ the princess said, speaking through me.

  ‘Your mother is still alive, but she’s quite insane. Or didn’t they tell you?’

  ‘She is unwell.’

  ‘But you’ve never seen her, have you? You’ve never seen or spoken to her directly?’

  ‘I speak to my mother all the time.’

  ‘You speak to the panes, like the one that said hello to me when I came off the shuttle. That’s not your mother in that glass. It’s a guess at her, made by a machine that has been watching over her since she was a girl, a machine that thinks it knows what she’d do and say if she were there in person.’

  ‘Now you’re being nasty.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be - I just thought you should k
now the truth. It’s why your house is like it is - it’s her idea to keep tearing it down and rebuilding it. It’s because she’s mad, because she thinks they’re after her, for what she did. Of course, if you don’t think I’m telling the truth, you’d only have to ask one of the people looking after you.’

  ‘You’re different,’ I said. ‘Ever since you went into Palatial, you’ve been more like the count and less like ...’ I must have said his name at that point, but I have no recollection of what it might have been.

  From the belvedere I watched his shuttle lift off, fold its legs away and power into the brassy haze of the Golden Hour, towards that fog of ten million Lesser Worlds.

  Then I went to ask some hard questions.

  I had always accepted that my mother was too unwell to receive guests, even her own daughter. It was such an established fact of my life that I had never had cause to question it, any more than I questioned why I had been born Abigail Gentian and not some other girl, born into a different family somewhere else around the Sun. My mother had spoken to me ever since I was small, and she had always shown pride and affection.

  ‘You’re a very special young lady, Abigail Gentian. You’re going to do great things with your life.’

  She had always made me feel special, as if all the bright and pretty things in the universe had been put there for my benefit. Other people could reach out for them, but their reach would falter while mine succeeded. Although I’d had no physical contact with my mother, I had always thought of her as a wise and kind person, one who would have given me all the love and tenderness in the world had that been within her gift.

  But that was the day when I found out that my mother was insane, and the only thing she cared about was escaping - or at least temporarily outwitting, in an unending struggle - the phantoms she believed were stalking her. If I existed to her, I was just a dot, a data point, in a vast mosaic of self-absorption.

  Everything was different after that.

  I went to see Madame Kleinfelter. She was at her desk, surrounded by hovering charts showing the division of labour amongst the house staff and clone nannies. When I came in she was using a luminous stylus to move work blocks around, tapping it against her lips as she pondered some weighty rearrangement of schedules and duty shifts.

  ‘What is it now, Abigail?’ she asked, obviously hoping that I would be worn out after an afternoon in Palatial.

  ‘Is my mother insane?’

  Madame Kleinfelter closed the charts and put down the stylus. ‘It’s the little boy, isn’t it?’ She mentioned his name, of course, or perhaps his family name. ‘He’s been telling you things.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘You know your mother is unwell. But you speak to her daily on the panes, as do I. Does she seem insane to you?’

  ‘Not exactly—’

  ‘Does she not love you and tell you how much you matter to her?’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  “‘Yes but” what, Abigail?’

  ‘Do the panes really show my mother?’ The little boy’s words were still ringing in my head. ‘Or just what a machine thinks she’d do and say?’

  Madame Kleinfelter looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Why would the panes show anything but your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know. But why can’t I just and go and see her?’

  ‘Because she is very unwell. She must be kept apart from other people until she can be cured - which will happen in the fullness of time. But until then, the isolation must remain in force, and the panes are our only point of contact.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. My mother is insane. Something pushed her over the edge.’

  ‘This is not you speaking, Abigail. It’s that frightful little ...’ Madame Kleinfelter caught herself before she said something unseemly. ‘Nothing pushed your mother over the edge. She had ... problems, that’s all.’

  ‘Is Mother the reason the house is the way it is?’

  Perhaps Madame Kleinfelter had been hoping I would accept her rebuttals and leave, until the moment I asked that question. I could see the change in her face. In her eyes I had crossed some mental Rubicon - not between childhood and adolescence, for I was still not old enough for that - but between degrees of childhood. Children can know of death and pain and madness and still be children.

  ‘I was hoping you’d wait a year or two before asking about that,’ my guardian said.

  ‘I want to know now,’ I said, with a defiance that astonished me.

  ‘Then you had better follow me. But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?’

  ‘Yes. I am very, very sure.’

  So she took me to the forbidden heart of the house, where they kept my mother, and I learned everything that Madame Kleinfelter and the other adults would rather have withheld from me until I was older. My mother was indeed insane, just as the little boy had told me. She had been driven mad by guilt and shame: by the burden of knowing what her beautiful clones had done, and what had in turn been done to them.

  Without the family’s expertise in cloning, the Conflagration would have played out very differently. The side we had ‘sponsored’ would have either had to embrace the same kinds of weapon as their enemy - autonomous killing machines - or capitulate, surrender under the humiliating terms of the other faction. Instead they had been given an unlimited army to send into the fray, each vat-fresh soldier or pilot carrying an operational lifetime’s worth of battle wisdom. The Conflagration was brief; it hardly touched the lives of any of the hundreds of billions of citizens who made up the mass population of the Golden Hour, but it still cost vast numbers of lives. During the hot weeks of that war, it was easy to forget that the clones were anything other than a form of organic-based artificial intelligence, put into empty ships and suits the way pigeons were once trained to guide bombs to their targets, a thousand years earlier.

  My mother maintained a façade of mental composure during the war, but in the aftermath - as the toll of casualties became apparent - remorse began to chip at the fragile edifice of her sanity. She started dwelling on all the lives that had been created, and then lost, because of our family’s ingenuity. Some of her clones had lived only weeks or months, yet they had gone into battle with memories stretching back subjective years. They had felt themselves to be fully formed human beings.

  My mother’s guilt took a peculiar and morbid twist. She began to insist that the souls of the dead were coming after her, determined to wreak vengeance for the parody of life she had inflicted on them. It was a madness, but once it had taken root in her mind, nothing could be done to eradicate it. The best psychosurgeons in the Golden Hour were brought in to try to cure my mother, but each intervention only seemed to push her deeper into mental infirmity. They took her brain apart like a luxurious, difficult parlour puzzle, polished each segment and then reassembled it piece by piece. They gave her a comfort blanket of false memories. They tried to delete all knowledge of the war.

  Nothing worked.

  Madame Kleinfelter brought me to a room with a wall that leaned outward. There were shutters on the windows. She worked a lever and bade me stand next to her, looking down at the room that contained my mother.

  She floated in a tank, suspended upright in brackish pink fluid. I had already been told that I could not go down into the room itself, in which a condition of strict surgical sterility was maintained. I could see the reason for that: the top of my mother’s head was missing, revealing an obscene marvel of glistening pink-grey brain tissue. The convoluted mass was studded with so many probes and lines that it resembled a pincushion. A mass of cables ran down the side of the tank into an oblong of dark machinery set on a trolley. Three green-overalled technicians were in attendance, looking uncannily like the ones who had come to install Palatial. They stood o
n a platform halfway up the side of the tank, so that they could reach the devices if required. They were studying floating displays, talking to each other in low, professional voices - I could see their lips moving through the thin gauze of their masks. Occasionally my mother’s limbs would thrash in the pink suspension, but the technicians paid her movements no heed.

  ‘She’s been like this for thirty years,’ Madame Kleinfelter said. ‘It may look unpleasant, but she’s in no pain. Her only distress comes from the things she imagines for herself. She has good days and bad days. On the good days, she can talk to us more or less normally. She still maintains her belief system, even then, but she has enough focus and concentration that she can discuss the family’s affairs, contribute to policy decisions and make further plans for the house.’

  ‘Is this a good day or a bad day?’

  ‘This is in the middle. She’s in there somewhere, fighting or running from something only she can see. But she can’t talk to us - she’s too preoccupied.’

  ‘Tell me about the house.’

  ‘Your mother convinced herself that there was a way to keep the ghosts at bay. Here at the heart of the house, she feels relatively safe. She wouldn’t dream of venturing into the peripheral wings even if she were able. Much too vulnerable, in her view. As her psychosis took hold she moved deeper and deeper into the house, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the outside world. This became her world. To begin with it was just a few rooms. Then it contracted down to just this one, and then to just this tank. Even that wasn’t enough. She constructed barriers to fool and delay the ghosts. Corridors that don’t lead anywhere, or which spiral back on themselves. Hidden stairways that they won’t see. Mirrors everywhere, to baffle and confuse her tormentors. Doors that open onto walls. Of course, even that isn’t sufficient by itself. The ghosts are clever and resourceful, and they’ll keep trying to find a way in. That’s why the house has to keep changing, so that they never get used to one particular configuration. There must always be new wings and new towers, expanding ever outwards. And what already exists must be reshaped all the time, to create labyrinths and traps. The process must never end, Abigail. While the house remains in flux, your mother manages to hold on to a fragment of sanity, even if it’s only on the good days. If it were to stop changing, if she were to believe that there was now no obstacle to the ghosts reaching her, I do not think she would be able to hold on to that fragment. We would have lost her for ever.’ Madame Kleinfelter paused and took my hand in hers, which was large and rough-skinned. ‘As it is, there is still hope. The specialists still believe they can bring her back. That’s why we keep up with her wishes, and the house is the way it is. It has meant you growing up in a strange environment, one that many children would have found frightening and disorientating. But you have done very well, Abigail. We are all proud of you - each and every one of us, including your mother.’