The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  “They keep away from us, mostly,” Gris said. “We aren’t enemies, as such. We are obliged to conduct a certain amount of business, and of course the Totalists have no contact with the outside world at all. On the rare occasions when they need something, they have to rely on our cooperation. But I would not say our relationship is an easy one. There have been … acts of artistic sabotage. Denied, of course. But it’s no secret that the Totalists view our work as decadent, corrupted, mired in a state of creative exhaustion.”

  “I suppose it was inevitable,” Oleg said. “There can’t have been an artistic movement in history that hasn’t eventually fractured into two or more creative poles. If it’s any consolation, they’ll have their own splitters sooner or later!”

  “No,” Gris said. “It’s no consolation at all. We made something beautiful here, Oleg. There’s no reason in the world it had to break up like this.”

  As they approached the Totalists’ encampment Oleg was struck by how profoundly the scene resembled an exact negative image of the dayside caravan. The sky was a nearly faultless black, its perfection only marred (or improved upon, perhaps) by a sprinkling of stars and planets, the great glittery arch of the Milky Way and the faint dust haze of the solar system’s zodiacal light.

  Whereas the caravan had moved under the full blaze of day, here the only lights were those provided by the Totalists themselves. The encampment was smaller than the caravan, but the essentials were similar: it was a cluster of things which could be dragged or self-propelled across Mercury, when the time came to move. They also had sails and pennants, except that these were picked out in edges of colourful neon: reds and yellows, blues and greens, purples and oranges. The figures moving around the camp’s periphery were also outlined in bright hues. Oleg had been expecting something austere, but the proliferation of colours and shapes elevated his spirits.

  “It’s marvellous!” he said.

  Rising from the illuminated camp was what Oleg took to be a piece of large-scale art in the same spirit as the stallion and the balancing woman. It was a cluster of spires, or perhaps a single main spire attended by a large number of smaller ones, linked by a connecting tissue of arches and flying buttresses. The pale structure had a knobby, rough-cast haphazardness about it. It might almost have been glued together from millions of sea-shells, or fossils.

  “The Bone Cathedral,” Gris said, with a hint of dismissiveness.

  “Do they move that around with them? It looks much too fragile.”

  “No, it stays fixed to this spot. They’ve been building it for several years now. The day and night cycles don’t seem to do it any harm. When it is time for a new Totalist to complete their crossing, the caravan circles the Bone Cathedral.” Gris applied the brakes and brought the vehicle to a halt. They were still a decent kilometre from the Totalist encampment. “You’d best go the rest of the way yourself.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You need do nothing. They will either talk to you or ignore you. They already know that you are here.”

  He disembarked from the vehicle. He looked up at the goggle-faced creature that had become his companion, fully aware that if Gris abandoned him here – and the Totalists disdained to help – he would be in a great deal of trouble. They had come much too far for the range of his suit.

  “I would not be too long about it,” Gris warned.

  So Oleg wandered across the black Playa. His suit projected a terrain overlay. It was still functioning properly. He kept looking back, making sure the vehicle and the cyborg still waited. But Gris remained. And as the Totalist camp loomed larger, so one of the neon forms broke away from the blaze of colour and came loping over to meet him.

  The thing had arms and legs, a body and a head in roughly the right proportions, but there was no possibility that it was anything but a robot. There was no room in it for anything human. The thing’s chassis was an open exoskeleton, offering an easy view of its internal mechanisms. Oleg saw lots of machinery in there, much of it lit up and flashing in pretty colours, but there was nothing that looked biological. Its head was a cage that he could see all the way through, only loosely stuffed with instruments and modules.

  “I’d like to speak to Rhawn,” Oleg said confidently.

  “Who are you, and why have you come?” The robot’s voice, picked up by his helmet, was lighter in tone than that of Gris.

  “I am Oleg. I’ve come from Jupiter to offer Rhawn a moon of her own and the chance at reverse cyborgisation – to become fully human again.”

  The robot emitted a noise like fading static. It took Oleg a moment to realise he was being laughed at.

  “Go home, meat boy. Be on your merry way.”

  “I realise that my offer’s likely to be rejected. But my masters won’t be satisfied until I have the answer from Rhawn herself. She’s here, isn’t she? I won’t take more than a few minutes of her time.”

  “Your timing,” the robot said, “is either very fortuitious or very poor.”

  “My timing is sheer luck,” Oleg said. “Until just now I didn’t even know that Rhawn had joined the Totalists.”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “I was told …”

  “Rhawn has commenced her second crossing. But until it is complete, she will not be one of us. It will happen soon, though. We are confident in the force of her conviction. It is certainly much too late for reversal.”

  “Can I at least talk to her?”

  Again Oleg had the sense that matters were being discussed. Lights flickered and strobed in the cagelike enclosure of the robot’s head. Oleg risked a glance back, satisfying himself that the vehicle and its driver were still there.

  “Rhawn is … receptive,” the robot said. “You will have your audience. But it will be brief. Rhawn has readied herself for the final phase of the crossing. She will not be detained.”

  “I only need an answer.”

  The robot brought him into the encampment. Up close, he saw that it was not as similar to the caravan as he had first assumed. There were hardly any enclosed spaces – just a few sealed modules which may or may not have been airtight. The remainder of the structures – most of them wheeled or skid-mounted, even as they were now parked around the Bone Cathedral – were for the most part skeletal frames. Their roofs were parasols and solar-collectors, their walls either absent or no more than concertina-hinged magnetic screens which could be drawn across when required. Gathered around and inside these treehouse-like forms were many similar-looking robots, lounging or reclining like overfed monkeys. They were plugged into bits of architecture via their abdomens - recharging from stored power, Oleg supposed, or perhaps pushing energy back into the community. There seemed little in the way of artistic creation going on. But perhaps the robots had been furiously preoccupied before his arrival.

  “Is Rhawn one of these?”

  “They are what Rhawn will become. It will not be long now.”

  “You all look the same.”

  “You all look like tinned meat.”

  Through the thicket of skeletal structures Oleg was at last brought to an upright green block the size of a small house. It was a round-ended cylinder that might once have been a fuel tank or reactor chamber, before being anchored to a moving platform and gristled over with access ladders, catwalks and power conduits. In contrast to its surroundings this dumpy, windowless flask seemed entirely enclosed. Oleg’s robot host spidered up a ladder and looked down as Oleg completed his clumsy ascent. The robot opened a door in the side of the chamber, then stood aside to allow Oleg to pass through first.

  It was not an airlock, for the interior of the green flask was still depressurised. Oleg had emerged onto a platform running around the circumference of the interior, with a circular gap in the middle. Supported in the chamber’s middle, with a large part of it beneath the level of the platform, was a hefty piece of biomedical machinery. Many cables and pipes ran into the upright, wasp-shaped assemblage. Three robots, much like his host, were
stationed around the machinery at what Oleg took to be control pedestals. They were not moving, but the robots had plugged in to the pedestals via their abdomens. Oleg presumed that they were directing whatever complicated procedure was going on inside the machine.

  The wasp-shaped machine culminated in a glass dome. Inside the glass was a beaked and goggled head much like that of Gris, except that it was encased within a bulky surgical clamp. Beneath the head, enclosing the neck, was a tight metal collar separating it from the rest of the machine.

  Oleg surveyed the beaked and goggled face with deep dread and apprehension.

  “Rhawn will speak to you now,” the robot said.

  “Thank you, Rhawn, for agreeing to listen to me,” Oleg said hastily. “I have come from Jupiter, with …”

  “I know where you came from, you spineless little shit.”

  Oleg bristled. He had listened to enough recordings to recognise the voice as belonging to Rhawn, despite a deliberate machinelike filtering.

  “I …” he began.

  “Stop cowering. What are you, bacteria? A vegetable? The Totalists horrify you, but you are the puppet, the thing with no free will.”

  “I only need an answer.”

  “I studied your background, when I knew you were approaching. Oleg the failed artist. Oleg the supine instrument of market forces. Oleg the pliable little turd, shat out by Jupiter. Why do you imagine your insolent little piss-streak of an offer would be of the remotest interest to me? Why should I not have your suit drilled through now?”

  “My masters thought …” His throat was as parched as the sunlit Playa itself. “They didn’t know that you’d left the Collective. They thought there might still be a possibility to …”

  “To do what? To make me normal again? To bring me back to the condition of meat?”

  “To undo what has been done.”

  “As if it were a mistake, that I now regretted?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “But your masters did. Did it never occur to question this mission? To doubt its idiotic purpose? To show the slightest sign of independent thought?”

  One of the robots at the control plinths turned its head slowly in his direction.

  “Things have changed since you came to Mercury,” Oleg persisted, refusing to waver under the robot’s eyeless regard. “No one knew what to make of your art, when you joined the Collective. It was too different, too hard to assess.”

  “If they were idiots then, they are idiots now.”

  “But idiots with money and influence. Do you understand the terms of the offer, Rhawn?”

  “My understanding is irrelevant. I can no more be ‘undone’ than an egg can be unsmashed, or meat uncooked. Let me demonstrate. Have you a strong stomach?”

  “I–”

  But Oleg had barely begun to give his answer. The surgical clamp around Rhawn’s cyborg head was reconfiguring itself, pulling away to separate the tight-fitting segments of her armour. Oleg thought back to what he had learned from Gris, of how the cyborg exoskeleton had become its living skin. This was how it must have been for Rhawn, before she exiled herself to the Totalists. There was a human head under her metal plates, but it was a head already skinned back to an anatomical core of muscle and sinew and nervous system. She had been blind, without the cameras. She had no nose or mouth or ears, for she did not need to breathe or speak or hear. Her cyborg senses were wired directly into deep brain structure, bypassing the crude telemetry of ancient nerve channels. Machinery was plumbed directly into her heart and lungs.

  “Are you horrified? You should not be. This is the state of being that Mercury demands of us. There is no pain, no discomfort, in being what we are. Far from it. We revel in our new strength, our bold new senses – our resilience. To each other, we have become beautiful. We drink in the sustenance of the dayside Sun and glory in the stellar cold of the Mercurean night. But why come this far, and not go all the way?”

  “They tell me that your crossing is nearly done.”

  “It’s true.” And for the moment her spite seemed to move off him. “There is almost nothing left of my old self now – the old vehicle in which I moved. What use are lungs and a heart, on Mercury? What use is a digestive system? What use is meat? These things are simply waiting to go wrong, waiting for their moment to fail us. To undermine us in our absolute, unblinking dedication to art. So we gladly discard that which the Collective fears to surrender. The flesh. Every organic part of ourselves. We donate our bones to the Bone Cathedral! The Playa was made for robots, Oleg – not ‘mere mortals’, or their half-way cousins. We are the true heirs of Mercury – we the Totalists!”

  Something in him snapped in that moment. “You’re committing suicide, in other words. Being taken apart, until there’s nothing left of you. You can’t become a robot, any more than you can become air, or sunlight!”

  “What is this – a glimmer of contradiction? The faintest signs of a spine? Keep at it – there may be hope for you yet.”

  “This isn’t about me. This is about you, throwing yourself away – wasting what you are.”

  “How little you understand of us. What would be the last thing I clung to, do you think? The last, most sacrosanct piece of myself?”

  “Your mind,” he stated firmly. “You do not reside in your heart and lungs, but without your brain, there is no Rhawn.”

  “What you mean is, without the encoding of my personality implied by my detailed idiosyncratic brain structure, there is no Rhawn. How could there be? But that encoding doesn’t care about the terms of its own embodiment.”

  “I would,” Oleg said, with fierce certainty.

  “Weeks ago, at the commencement of my second crossing, small volumes of my brain structure were duplicated by artifical connective structures located outside my body. Machine circuits, in other words. When neural signals passed through the interfaces of these brain volumes, my Totalist peers had the freedom to choose whether those signals continued to pass through my existing anatomy, or were instead shunted through the exosomatic structures. The change was made, and then switched back – and made again, over and over! The key thing is that I felt no change in my perception of self, regardless of whether my thoughts were running inside my head, or in the exterior circuitry! Electricity doesn’t mind which route it takes, as long as it gets to the same destination! And so, step by step, volumes of my own brain were switched out – supplanted and discarded! This continued. Over the weeks, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of my old architecture was supplanted by exosomatic machinery. And now you arrive. I stand now on the cusp of absolute machinehood – ready to make the final transition to Totality. Only the last ten percent of my mind is still inside my head. You see now why it is far, far too late to reverse what I have become?”

  “There’s still active brain tissue inside you?” he asked. “Still some meat, inside the head I’m looking at?”

  “What is left of me, you could squeeze between your fingers, like a handful of wet grey sand.”

  “Then where is the rest of you? Executing inside one of these machines? Already in a robot, waiting for you to take control?”

  “You misunderstand. Ninety percent of me has already completed the transition. And one hundred percent of me is already in control. My robot body is not ‘waiting’ for me. I am already mostly in it. And we have already met.”

  He turned from the globed head, conscious that the robot that had brought him in from outside was still there. He looked with renewed fascination at the symphony of flickering coloured lights.

  “I should have guessed. You never did give me your name.”

  “And you never asked,” the robot said, nodding. “But here I am. This is me. I am Rhawn. That thing that you have been talking to, that is just the place where I used to live.”

  “You could have given me your answer outside.”

  “I thought it would help if you understood. I am ready now, you see. But that last ten percent of me – I won’t
pretend that there has not been hesitation. I could have completed the transition days ago. On the brink, I quailed! Foolishly, I could not quite bring myself to submit to Totality. The meat’s pathetic last twitch! But you have been the spur I needed. For that alone, Oleg, you have my undying gratitude.”

  “I’ve done nothing!”

  “You have come, and now you may observe. Suffer one useful moment in your miserable existence. Are you prepared?”

  “For what?”

  “To bear witness. To document my becoming. In a moment, the last traces of my living neural tissue will cease to serve any useful function. And I will have transcended myself.” But when he thought she might be done, Rhawn added: “You may thank your masters, Oleg, for their kind offer. I spit it back at them, all the same. They were much too late, of course, but it would have made no difference if they had sent you years ago. I have been on this path for much too long for that. I have always felt the pull of Totality, even before I knew it in my self. The more I move from the meat, the more the meat repulses me.”

  “And one day,” Oleg said, “you’ll feel the need to go beyond this as well. It’s in your nature.”

  “What could possibly lie beyond the perfection of robotic embodiment?”

  “The greater perfection of non-embodiment. The flawless condition of non-existence.”

  “You mean that I would kill myself.”

  “I’m sure you will. You can’t ever accept what you are, Rhawn. It’s just not in your nature.”

  A new light came on in the robot’s head. It was a pale green, rising and falling in brightness without ever quite dimming completely. Oleg was quite sure it had not been activated earlier on.

  “Even now?” she asked.

  “Even now.”

  “Well, you’re mistaken. But then, you are only human. And now that I have completed my second crossing, I feel my conviction more forcefully than ever before. We shall have to see who is wrong, won’t we? I hope you have a great deal of patience, not to mention a solid medical plan. You are a bag of cells with an expiration date. Parts of you are already starting to rot. It will take me centuries to begin to exhaust the possibilities of Totality.”