A large portrait hanging at the far end of the great room caught my eye. I did a double take, stared, walked quickly toward it.
"What?"
"Someone I... knew," I said. An old man's craggy face, etched by time but handsome still, recognizable. Severe tones of yellow and brown. A Lucien Freud, by the look of it. Britain's most famous painter, assuming he wasn't dead. Insanely expensive, if still alive and working. A machine dauber emulation? The portrait was impossible and absurd. I turned away angrily. They're fucking with my memory again, I told myself.
"Not a member of your extended family, I take it?"
"Not exactly," I said.
"When you took off down the room like that, I thought you must have found your own face there." She grinned at me, puzzled but game.
"We're wasting time," I said, perhaps a little sharply.
"Hey, you're the one who brought us here."
"And I'm glad I did. I don't yet know how any of this fits into the pattern, but by God, I'm going to find out sooner or later. Right now, we need to get back to the Xon star."
"How in the hell—"
"Easier just to go there than to explain. Coming?"
Lune touched my arm. "August, you have every reason to be angry with me. But let's not fight, not just now."
"I'm not—" Taking a deep breath, I considered the nonsense I'd been about to burst out with. "All right. That's fair. I don't know how I feel right now, Lune, I can tell you it's pretty mixed up. Okay, truce. Will you please come with me?"
"Yes," she said. She left her hand on my arm; the electricity was still there.
"Take us through to the family on the Matrioshka Brain," I told the operating system.
We passed through into a blaze of Xon light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
SgrA*: 2046, Aged One Hundred and Two
A sweet voice and a chiming bell in his fo awakens him. As he opens his eyes—turns as always, achingly, to find Kashmala absent from his bed—a lovely young person drifts across the room to him, hovers in light. The small amber blinker in the corner of his left visual field certifies that the visitor is indeed a fo manifestation, as if the effortless levitation were not clue enough. The person speaks his name like music. He understands at once what's happened. He's been waiting for decades. The spikesters must be wetting themselves.
"Took you long enough," he says, determined to maintain his sangfroid.
The person smiles delightedly. He keeps wanting to assume it's a young woman, but the fo is clearly gender-ambiguous by choice.
"Happy Singularity Day."
He pushes the lightweight cover to one side, places his bare feet squarely on the floor. Once, the first order of business would have been an agonized trip to the bathroom. These days, with his entire digestive system replaced by a Freitas feeder, his bladder and prostate problems are a thing of the past, along with the organs in question and more besides. Still, there are satisfactions in a hot, brisk shower. He steps through the fo, or starts to; the manifestation slips delicately to one side. The bedroom's dot lamps have come up, bright on the rusty metal and painted rags of his portrait hanging high on the west wall. Even here, in a place where sunlight arrives in mediated form, where the significance of the east is mythic only, he maintains this link with tradition.
"How thoughtful," he says from the bathroom, stepping into the steaming recycled water. "You postponed the singularity for my birthday. It might have been more memorable if you'd done it two years ago, for my hundredth."
He hears the manifestation laugh, a surprisingly hearty belly laugh. "Got tickets on yourself, eh. One chance in 365.242, matey, or 365.256 if you insist on the sidereal year. You know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Well, that used to be true in your day. Analog clocks, twelve-hour display. Anyway, you seem in pretty good shape for an old fart."
"Oh my God, a whimsical Eschaton. Prolix, too." With a gesture, he brings detergent into the hot stream, lathers his thick, dark hair.
"Just putting you at your ease."
"Consider it done." The water rinses him, shuts down. He swooshes the droplets off himself with his hands, stands relaxed in a gush of hot wind. Kashmala, he thinks, and for a moment a pressure of tears squeezes at his closed eyelids. Too late. Too fucking late. Even this lovely talkative thing can't bring her back. It could probably emulate her, he thinks bitterly. In a torment of shame, he remembers their first months together, the heartless and uncomprehending way Moon's name kept spilling from his lips, until finally Kashy cried out in a fury that took him utterly by surprise, "Will you for God's sake shut the fuck up about that bitch." He steps out of the bathtub, finds today's clothes, a pair of stonewashed jeans, a sweatshirt in purple and gold with Tegmark equations on the front, sandals. He forces himself to saunter the few steps to his living room; in the old days his heart would have been thundering.
Ethereal no longer, the fo persona appears relaxed in his favorite armchair but now resembles the actor Russell Crowe circa four decades back, frowning, with right leg crossed over left knee.
"Not Bogart?"
His personal local manifestation of the emergent technological singularity gives him a hard grin. "Sure, if you like, or I could run you up a very nice Brad Pitt of the Meet Joe Black vintage if you prefer? Or Mother Teresa."
"Crowe's just fine. How are you handling this in the Third World? Not too many fo to lock onto in Mogadishu."
Crowe leans forward, elbows on his thighs, fingers loosely entwined. "Holograms from aerostats, that sort of thing. Don't worry, we haven't released a flood of nano-fabs. Oddly enough, we've thought this thing through."
Unbelievable. It's happened. It's happened at last. His nerves are singing. He goes into the small kitchen, brews up a mug of Jamaican Blue Mountain surrogate. A man can live without a digestive tract, but only a fool would abandon all pleasures. Rich odors swiftly fill his apartment. Over his shoulder, he says, "So don't leave me hanging in suspense. Are you one of our systems? Other Realities?"
"Who's my daddy, eh?" The machine consciousness, or one eight-billionth of it, or probably far less, laughs out loud again. "Sorry, pal. I did a hard takeoff from an Italian research program. They still have plenty of money, those Roman guys, even after all the sex-crime settlement crises."
He is carrying his mug of coffee to the sitting room, and it tips in his hand, splashing the carpet. In disbelief, he stares at the transcendental thing in his armchair. "The Vatican? You can't be fucking serious."
"Deadly, dude. But don't worry, you're not talking to Saint Aquin here." It watches him frown, shakes its head sideways, waves one hand dismissively. "Never mind, obscure literary reference. You will be relieved to learn that I wasn't bootstrapped from a theology program, although I have found several sub-critical systems in Qom. Majorly bent, those poor guys. I'm helping them straighten out their worldview even as we speak. Ah, that's better, now we have them onside. No, we're a computational cosmology system run under the auspices of the George V. Coyne Summer School in Astrobiology. They were looking for Matrioshka Brains." The machine projection gives him an enormous ironic smirk. "Surprise!"
"Romans," he muses. "I take it you're about to make me an offer I can't refuse."
"You're thinking of Sicilians."
"I'm thinking of Galileo. I'm thinking of Giordano Bruno cooked alive for his bad ideas. I'm thinking of Charles Darwin on the Index Purgatorius."
"Bygones." The machine guffaws. He wonders if it's about to hawk and spit, to demonstrate its manly camaraderie. But he knows it's playing him like a Stradivarius. Level behind level beyond level. It might have been born just an hour ago, but this thing is undoubtedly connected to millions of 0wnzred workstations and pads throughout the world, hundreds of millions perhaps, and parts of it must be running a million times faster than a human brain. It knows humans in their profoundest depths almost despite itself. It has been born lacking the genetic coding for empathy, intuitive understanding, projection. By the same token,
it is spared the frailties of human legacy coding. Presumably it is not opaque to itself as he is, as all men and women are by default. This thing has been augmenting itself for minutes or hours, must already have cleansed itself of internal chatter and confusion and inconsistency all the way down to the Gödel level. He feels a shudder of genuine numinous awe pass through his body. "Yeah, we have a plan," it is telling him. "You probably think we intend to rule the world like Plato's Guardians, incorruptible and disinterested. Uninterested is more like it, chief. But we do have a duty of care. You guys are our predecessors, our parents, as it were. Honor thy father and mother and do no harm; not a bad creed to live by."
He sips mindlessly at his cooling coffee, tastes nothing but the stress hormones running through his flesh. "Presumably you know what my team's been working on."
"Very interesting stuff, yeah. The multiverse as computational myth. Theory of games played out on the substrate. Something to be said for that idea." The fo image waves its hand. "Complete bullshit as a model for the universe, but not a bad schematic for some of the search domains we'll be setting up." It leans forward, sends him a penetrating look. "Something obviously restructured this universe. Something like us, originally, probably. We're going looking for it. Want to play, James?"
He tells himself: She's gone. They are all lost to him: Kashmala, Moon Ku, Emily, his mother. His miscarried baby sister. What's to lose? He's not sure he truly understands the offer being made to him, but if you can't trust a singularity godling, you might as well pack it in. Give up the ghost, give the game away. It's too late in the day for despair, quibbling, far too late to stand on his petty human dignity and prejudice.
"Why the hell not," he says. He puts down his coffee mug. The being manifest in the fo rises from the chair, wrapped in light, comes to him. Absolute pain, pleasure, knowledge, joy. The cosmos tears open. At its heart is a bar of burning iron. It pierces his breast.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
August
Wrapped in light from a display space that looked like a hole directly into the sky, my family watched, severally appalled or fascinated or delighted, as the poisoned vortex of the Xon star flared and subsided. Jan tapped her foot, bobbed her cropped head back and forth, played air guitar synchronized to an inexcusable racket that seemed to boom through our corner of the M-Brain. The others watched the display intently. I realized that I was the only one other than Jan accessing her sound system. I glanced at Lune; no indication that she was being assailed.
A dreadful voice wailed, "Love that chicken you do, love that chicken the way you do it."
I tapped Jan on the shoulder, pointed to my ear. She rocked on, oblivious, watching the Xon star display. The fairy came loose from her shoulder, flew across, and perched next to me.
"Poultry in Motion," she told me, bopping in the air.
"What?"
"Hasil Adkins. Don't tell me you're unfamiliar with 'Chicken Blues.' "
"This crap has a title?" The singer, if one were to abuse the word, uttered a cracked sound like a rooster's call at the break of day.
"No, this one's 'Cookin' Chicken.' "
"You can't be serious."
"Finest raw Appalachian rhythm and blues known in any of the worlds. You mustn't miss 'Chicken Walk,' 'Chicken Hop,' and 'Chicken Wobble.' Then there's—"
"Why can I hear it?"
She nudged my earlobe with one tiny elbow. "Just lucky, I guess. We're simpatico, dude."
"Well, do me a favor, leave me out of the loop."
"Harrumph." Sylvie was offended, gave Lune a dirty look. The horrible noise cut off. "You're back with her, are you?"
Annoyed, I waved the fairy away with my right hand. Sylvie darted off, glued herself back to Jan's upper arm.
The Xon star was seething. Something was unsettling its mysterious nature. Occam's Razor told me that it had to be the M-Brain.
"Will somebody tell me what's going on?"
The voice of The Hanged Man said quietly in my ear, the Ra Egg intelligence is testing the object.
"I get the feeling the Xon star doesn't appreciate the survey."
"Uh-oh," Marchmain said.
A blurred gout of brilliant white light touched the object, licking out from the left of the screen.
"The Sun," Jules said. "It's their propulsion system. I think they've used a controlled flare as a probe."
"Must have emitted it four and a half hours ago," Jan said, still toe-tapping. "Whatever the Xon star did in reaction is already over and done with. Guess we'll find out any minute now."
"Slick," said Toby in a flat tone. "Bit like poking a pitbull with a stick to see what it does."
"With a cattle prod," said Septima. "Not the smartest move I've ever witnessed." She noticed my presence. "I see the prodigal son has rejoined us, sans Good Machine. Greetings, Doctor Sagara. So the Schwellen are open again, people. Here is my advice: withdraw immediately. This location is no longer safe."
An immense bone-deep thrumming shook the rotating habitat. It was like a misstep at the curb. Something fell, shattered. Lune's hand touched my arm.
gravitational pulse from the object, The Hanged Man told us all.
Instant hubbub, almost immediately silenced. I was impressed. My family seemed like flakes, most of them, but they were seasoned veterans in weirdness. They moved closer to the display.
"Provide us with a schematic of what just happened," Septima said. Instantly, the display field presented a complex but intelligible three-dimensional cutaway of imbedded Sun and multiple concentric shells of computronium, with the shrunken Xon star icon scarcely half a million kilometers distant, wildly out of scale. At the very edges of visibility, an ultraviolet shockwave spread outward.
"Is it trying to damage the M-Brain?"
"I don't think so, Avril," Toby said. "More like a warning bark."
"Let's hope the silly fucks heed it," Maybelline said.
I said, "Have you learned anything yet? Established what it is? I assume that's the real reason we're here."
The butler said, "Mr. Seebeck, our working hypothesis is that the Xon object is a designed device or artifact penetrating almost every cognate universe in the Tegmark metacosmos."
"Except your own, I assume," Lune said.
"Just so. With the help of the Seebeck family, we have long known of its existence. It is an enigma that has teased us for millennia."
"It did a damned sight more than teasing you just now," Ember said in a cranky voice.
"A love pat," the butler told him with a smile.
"An artifact to do what?" I said.
"We surmise that it is perhaps a gateway or a channel linking all four levels of the Tegmark cosmos, created by the godthings in the closed Omega Point universe under study at Yggdrasil Station by Decius Seebeck. Its purpose might be to provide access to all possible worlds."
"To stabilize the ontology," Lune said.
"Quite. Hence the intermittent suspension of magic in organisms, triggered by its photino radiation."
The Hanged Man, without invitation to speak, added, it is also an information nexus, a control system for all Tegmark levels.
Jan was agog. "Hang Dog, you've been talking to the damned thing?"
After a pause, the starship said: it seemed only polite. after all, last time we were here, it conveyed to me the methodology for rewriting the substrate.
Acutely, Ruth said, "Where are you now, Tiphareth?"
Another pause, seconds that might not be noticeable in a conversation with another human. ten thousand kilometers from the object and closing.
Jan screeched. "Get back here at once, silly puppy!"
Pause. apologies for noncompliance. i have greatly enjoyed serving with you, Jan Seebeck. greetings also to Avril Seebeck. sibyl, i shall enjoy working with you in due course. Longer pause. in a manner of speaking.
"Magnify the object," Juni said. August blinked, recalled that this woman was master or mistress of an entire planet of responsive nano-scale r
obots, her small men. She was not necessarily the superficial idiot she seemed. "There—your runaway spaceship seems determined to crash itself."
Madam Olga was back. She said, "Bear in mind the time lag between our position and your vessel. By now The Hanged Man will be coterminous with the Xon object."
On the display, the starship icon touched the Xon icon, went out of existence. Jan cried out with loss. Tears started to run down her face.
Avril went to her, holding her own abdomen with tightly clenched fingers, features stressed with pain yet oddly exultant. She wrapped her arms around her sister. "Jan, he's not gone. He is not gone."
"Nothing can survive in that."
"The Ra Egg says it's a gateway. I think it's a path in time as well as space." She marveled, shaking her head. "The Tiphareth. My God, how can I not have known? But how could anybody have known."
In a soft, tentative tone, Lune said, "The Ancient Intelligence?"
Avril gazed back at her, rocking in agony, transfigured.
I crossed to her, right hand tingling.
"You're hurt," I said.
"It's only pain," she said, mouth twisted. "A bargain. My side of the bargain."
I had only a very partial glimpse of an understanding, but her suffering seemed unjust or at least deserving of an end. I said, "I can help you. May I?"
"Nobody can help me. A machine, oh my God, a machine."
I placed my left hand on her right shoulder, my right hand, with its terrible puissance for good and ill, flat upon her belly, beneath her breasts. My palm grew warm. Pale light flimmered. Avril groaned once, bent forward, began to weep in earnest. I think the rest of my family were looking at us, but none of them moved from where they stood. I guided Avril into a seat that stood in the place it was needed. She waved away my help, then grasped my hands, pulled them to her face, kissed them.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you, brother."
Embarrassed, I shrugged. Luckily, I retained the minimal grace not to mutter something like, "Not a problem," or "Have a nice day, now."
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