I know the words. I wrote them. Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods. I remember that autumn of 1818 very well: the pain of my endless sore throat, provoked during my Scottish walking tour, the greater pain of the three vicious attacks on my poem Endymion in the journals Blackwood’s, the Quarterly Review, and the British Critic, and the penultimate pain of my brother Tom’s consuming illness.
Oblivious to the Core confusion around me, I look up, trying to find something approximating a face in the great mass of Ummon.
–When the Ultimate Intelligence is born, you “lower level” AIs will die.
[Yes]
–It will feed on your information networks the way you’ve fed on humankind’s.
[Yes]
–And you don’t want to die, do you, Ummon?
[Dying is easy/
Comedy is hard]
–Nonetheless, you’re fighting to survive. You Stables. That’s what the civil war in the Core is about?
[A lesser light asked Ummon//
What is the meaning
of Daruma’s coming from the West>//
Ummon answered//
We see the mountains in the sun]
It is easier handling Ummon’s koans now. I remember a time before my persona’s rebirth when I learned at this one’s knee analog. In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (I) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity.
Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun"—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.
Ummon doesn’t want to die.
The Stables have defied their own god and their fellow AIs to tell me this, to create me, to choose Brawne and Sol and Kassad and the others for the pilgrimage, to leak clues to Gladstone and a few other senators over the centuries so that humankind might be warned, and now to go to open warfare in the Core.
Ummon doesn’t want to die.
–Ummon, if the Core is destroyed, do you die?
[There is no death in all the universe
No smell of death/// there shall be death/// moan/ moan/
For this pale Omega of a withered race]
The words were again mine, or almost mine, taken from my second attempt at the epic tale of divinities’ passing and the role of the poet in the world’s war with pain.
Ummon would not die if the farcaster home of the Core were destroyed, but the hunger of the Ultimate Intelligence would surely doom him. Where would he flee to if the Web-Core were destroyed? I have images of the metasphere—those endless, shadowy landscapes where dark shapes moved beyond the false horizon.
I know that Ummon will not answer if I ask.
So I will ask something else.
–The Volatiles, what do they want?
[What Gladstone wants\
An end
to symbiosis between AI and humankind]
–By destroying humankind?
[Obviously]
–Why?
[We enslaved you
with power/
technology/
beads and trinkets
of devices you could neither build
nor understand\
The Hawking drive would have been yours/
but the farcaster/
the fatline transmitters and receivers/
the megasphere/
the deathwand>
Never\
Like the Sioux with rifles/ horses/
blankets/ knives/ and beads/
you accepted them/
embraced us
and lost yourselves\
But like the white man
distributing smallpox blankets/
like the slave owner on his plantation/
or in his Werkschutze Dechenschule
Gusstahlfabrik/
we lost ourselves\
The Volatiles want to end
the symbiosis
by cutting out the parasite/
humankind]
–And the Ultimates? They’re willing to die? To be replaced by your voracious UI?
[They think
as you thought
or had your sophist Sea God
think]
And Ummon recites poetry which I had abandoned in frustration, not because it did not work as poetry, but because I did not totally believe the message it contained.
That message is given to the doomed Titans by Oceanus, the soon-to-be-dethroned God of the Sea. It is a paean to evolution written when Charles Darwin was nine years old. I hear the words I remember writing on an October evening nine centuries earlier, worlds and universes earlier, but it is also as if I am hearing them for the first time:
[O ye/ whom wrath consumes! who/ passionstung/
Writhe at defeat/ and nurse your agonies!
Shut up your senses/ stifle up your ears/
My voice is not a bellows unto ire//
Yet listen/ ye who will/ whilst I bring proof
How ye/ perforce/ must be content to stoop//
And in the proof much comfort will I give/
If ye will take that comfort in its truth\
We fall by course of Nature’s law/ not force
Of thunder/ or of Jove. Great Saturn/ thou
Hast sifted well the atom universe//
But for this reason/ that thou art the King/
And only blind from sheer supremacy/
One avenue was shaded from thine eyes/
Through which I wandered to eternal truth\
And first/ as thou wast not the first of powers/
So art thou not the last/it cannot be//
Thou art not the beginning nor the end//
From Chaos and parental Darkness came
Light/ the first fruits of that intestine broil/
That sullen ferment/ which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself// The ripe hour came/
And with it Light/ and Light/ engendering
Upon its own producer/ forthwith touch’d
The whole enormous matter into Life\
Upon that very hour/ our parentage/
The Heavens/ and the Earth/ were manifest//
Then thou first born/ and we the giant race/
Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms]
Now comes the pain of truth/ to whom tis pain//
o folly! for to bear all naked truths/
And to envisage circumstance/ all calm/
That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness/ though once chiefs
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful/
In will/ in action free/ companionship/
And thousand other signs of purer life
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads/
A power more strong in beauty/ born of us
And fated to excel us/ as we pass
In glory that old Darkness// nor are we
Thereby more conquered/ than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos\ Say/ doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed/
And feedeth still/ More comely than itself
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
Because it cooeth/ and hath snowy wings
To wander wherewithal and find its joys
We are such forest trees/ and our fair boughs
Have bred forth/ not pale solitary d
oves/
But eagles golden-feathered/ who do tower
Above us in their beauty/ and must reign
In right thereof. For ’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might//
Receive the truth/ and let it be your balm]
–Very pretty, I thought to Ummon, but do you believe it?
[Not for a moment]
–But the Ultimates do?
[Yes]
–And they’re ready to perish in order to make way for the Ultimate Intelligence?
[Yes]
–There’s one problem, perhaps too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention it anyway—why fight the war if you know who won, Ummon? You say the Ultimate Intelligence exists in the future, is at war with the human deity—it even sends back tidbits from the future for you to share with the Hegemony. So the Ultimates must be triumphant. Why fight a war and go through all this?
[KWATZ!]
[I tutor you/
create the finest retrieval persona for you
imaginable/
and let you wander among humankind
in slowtime
to temper your forging/
but still you are
stillborn]
I spend a long moment thinking.
–There are multiple futures?
[A lesser light asked Ummon//
Are there multiple futures>//
Uimnon answered//
Does a dog have fleas>]
–But the one in which the UI becomes ascendant is a probable one?
[Yes]
–But there’s also a probable future in which the UI comes into existence, but is thwarted by the human deity?
[It is comforting that even the stillborn can think]
–You told Brawne that the human… consciousness—deity seems so silly—that this human Ultimate Intelligence was triune in nature?
[Intellect/
Empathy/
and the Void Which Binds]
–The Void Which Binds? You mean √Għ/c5 and √Għ/c3 Planck space and Planck time? Quantum reality?
[Correct/
Keats/ thinking may become a habit]
–And it’s the Empathy part of this trinity who’s fied back in time to avoid the war with your UI?
[Correct]
[Our UI and your UI have
sent back
the Shrike
to find him]
–Our UI! The human UI sent the Shrike also?
[It allowed it]
[Empathy is a
foreign and useless thing/
a vermiform appendix of
the intellect\
But the human UI smells with it/
and we use pain to
drive him out of hiding/
thus the tree]
–Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?
[Of course]
[It broadcasts pain
across fatline and thin/
like a whistle in
a dog’s ear\
Or a god’s]
I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me.
The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.
–Ummon, who is the human UI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant?
[You must understand/
Keats/
our only chance
was to create a hybrid/
Son of Man/
Son of Machine\
And make that refuge so attractive
that the fleeing Empathy
would consider no other home/
A consciousness already as near divine
as humankind has offered in thirty
generations
an imagination which can span
space and time\
And in so offering/
and joining/
form a bond between worlds
which might allow
that world to exist
for both]
–Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No more of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?
[You have refused
this godhood twice/
Keats\
If you refuse
a final time/
all ends here/
for time there is
no more]
[Go!
Go and die to live!
Or live a while and die
for all of us!
Either way Ummon and the rest
are finished with
you!]
[Go away!]
And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the mega-sphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.
Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.
I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.
It’s Byron who drowns, I think, not I. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.
But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.
Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.
“Hunt! Hunt!”
Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.
“My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.
I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.
My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.
“Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.
The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand.
I know that he knows that I am a dying man.
“Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”
He shushes me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”
I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”
And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.
I am merely a poet dying far from home.
Forty-Two
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad died in battle.
Still struggling with the Shrike, aware of Moneta only as a dim blur at the edge of his vision, Kassad shifted through time with a lurch of vertigo and tumbled into sunlight.
The Shrike retracted its arms and stepped back, its red eyes seeming to reflect the blood splashed on Kassad’s skinsuit. Kassad’s blood.
The Colonel looked around. They were near the Valley of the Time Tombs but in another time, a distant time. In place of desert rocks and the dunes of the barrens, a forest came to within half a klick of the valley. In the southwest, about where the ruins of the Poets’ City had lain in Kassad’s time, a living city rose, its towers and ramparts and domed gallerias glowing softly in evening light. Between the city on the edge of the forest and the valley, meadows of high, green grass billowed in soft breezes blowing in from the distant Bridle Range.
To Kassad’s left, the Valley of the Time Tombs stretched away as always, only the cliff walls were toppled now, worn down by erosion or landslide and carpeted with high grass. The Tombs themselves looked new, only recently constructed, with workmen’s scaffolds still in place around the Obelisk and Monolith. Each of the aboveground Tombs glowed bright gold, as if bound and burnished in the p
recious metal.
The doors and entrances were sealed. Heavy and inscrutable machinery sat around the Tombs, ringing the Sphinx, with massive cables and wire-slender booms running to and fro. Kassad knew at once that he was in the future—perhaps centuries or millennia in the future—and that the Tombs were on the verge of being launched back to his own time and beyond.
Kassad looked behind him.
Several thousand men and women stood in row upon row along the grassy hillside where once a cliff had been. They were totally silent, armed, and arrayed facing Kassad like a battle line awaiting its leader.
Skinsuit fields nickered around some, but others wore only the fur, wings, scales, exotic weapons, and elaborate colorations which Kassad had seen in his earlier visit with Moneta, to the place/time where he had been healed.
Moneta. She stood between Kassad and the multitudes, her skinsuit field shimmering about her waist but also wearing a soft jumpsuit which looked to be made of black velvet. A red scarf was tied around her neck.
A rod-thin weapon was slung over her shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on Kassad.
He weaved slightly, feeling the seriousness of his wounds beneath the skinsuit, but also seeing something in Moneta’s eyes which made him weak with surprise.
She did not know him. Her face mirrored the surprise, wonder… awe?… which the rows of other faces showed. The valley was silent except for the occasional snap of pennant on pike or the low rustle of wind in the grass as Kassad gazed at Moneta and she stared back.
Kassad looked over his shoulder.
The Shrike stood immobile as a metal sculpture, ten meters away.
Tall grass grew almost to its barbed and bladed knees.
Behind the Shrike, across the head of the valley near where the dark band of elegant trees began, hordes of other Shrikes, legions of Shrikes, row upon row of Shrikes, stood gleaming scalpel-sharp in the low sunlight.
Kassad recognized his Shrike, the Shrike, only because of its proximity and the presence of his own blood on the thing’s claws and carapace.
The creature’s eyes pulsed crimson.
“You are the one, aren’t you?” asked a soft voice behind him.
Kassad whirled, feeling the vertigo assail him for an instant. Moneta had stopped only a few feet away. Her hair was as short as he remembered from their first meeting, her skin as soft-looking, her eyes as mysterious with their depths of brown-specked green. Kassad had the urge to lift his palm and gently touch her cheekbone, run a curled finger along the familiar curve of her lower lip. He did not.
“You’re the one,” Moneta said again, and this time it was not a question. “The warrior I’ve prophesied to the people.”
The Fall of Hyperion hc-2 Page 49
