“Whatever I can do for you, I will.”
“Soon Know-Where-to-Go will complete its third stroke. The gravity amp will be up to 42 percent of full power. Genitrix has been using spilloff from the amp to run her program. But there is more than enough life among the worlds now. I want you to divert some of that spilloff to us.”
“How? Genitrix automatically picks up the spilloff, and I have no control over her.”
“Lod is still in your control. He manages the gravity amp. Siphon energy to us from Lod, enough to equal the spilloff, so there won’t be any for Genitrix to pick up.”
“What will you do with this energy?”
“Fight the zōtl. Advance our tech. Build cities. Everything we can to promote our survival for the forty centuries that are left us.”
Gai stood up and paced to the gallery’s glass parapet. She gazed at the splash of the galaxy and tried to reason like a human. The amount of energy Reena requested – it was enormous! Would these treacherous creatures use that power to attack her and shut down the gravity amp? Of course they would, if they had the chance. But she needed them to get the O’ode. There was no other way.
Turning about, the edges of her body smearing in motion-blurs, she faced Reena. “You will have the spillover power from the gravity amp. But I want you, Reena Patai, to take personal charge of its use.”
Reena smiled wanly. “I don’t think that’s a charge I shall be able to carry very long.”
“You are not going to die any time soon,” Gai promised. “I won’t let you. You are the only one I want to work with while the search goes on for the O’ode. Joao’s prophecy from the t-field is what sent Lod to the Overworld to find you. The timeline that leads to my survival is certainly connected with you in some way. Let’s work together.”
“The spirit is willing—”
“Then your flesh will comply. Your genetic supercoiling is age-proofed. You are simply displaying symptoms of cosmic ray sickness. With the spillover from the third stroke, we will have the power for an ion-flush technology that can and will restore your youth.”
“There is one more thing.”
Gai’s smile brittled.
“I want you to stop Genitrix from recovering more humans. Enough people have been called back from the dead. We do not need any more.”
Gai shook her head. “If I could access Genitrix, I would do a lot more than stop human production.”
“Try. You must have some kind of access to your chief machine intelligence.”
“The zōtl have lobotomized Genitrix. Believe me, there is nothing I can do. I’m just a mission commander, not a neuroprogrammer.”
“What about blasting her generative matrices?”
Gai’s virtual head rocked back. “You would have to destroy the whole system! Genitrix is at the core of each of these so-called planets.”
“Where is her central processor?”
“There is none. She’s holographic.”
“Okay, then, how about a lynk-patch to each of her cores. If we can get in there, maybe with Lod’s help we can reprogram her.”
“Maybe. But a lynk-patch that extensive will use up all our spillover—and you will have none left over for your war, your tech, or your cities.”
Reena sighed. “I just want to minimize the suffering. Our surveys estimate that every day three thousand more humans are recreated by Genitrix. That’s a million each year—and every one of them has already lived and died. When they wake here, they bring their histories with them. How can we create a society from such chaos? We must stop Genitrix. Our survival depends on it—and therefore yours.”
The Age of the Crystal Mind
Crystal minds express order in a boggling array of complexities, including compassion, pity, rapture, even love. They express these ordered states frequently and always with contextual relevance— yet, nothing they express is actually experienced by them. They are pattern-replicators—and that is all.
—Lemuel Tomimbang, Towerbottom Library,
Department of Crystal Physics, 112 Day, 218 Doror
The Magus of Cendre
As Know-Where-to-Go hurtled through Chalco-Doror for the third time, small pieces of the planet broke off. Streaming trails of frosty light like comets, the bright pieces inched among the planets. Several of these massive projectiles burst into fireballs among the asteroids and burned with silvergreen ferocity for weeks before cooling to embers of throbbing infrared. Each of the five comets that survived crawled into the orbit of a different planet and splashed through its atmosphere in a burst of vaporous fire, leaving behind the ghostly crown of an aurora. The auroras persisted, sustained by the compact but powerful magnetic field that rose from where the comets had impacted.
At the center of the kilometer-wide craters that had been formed, scorched cylinders broader than they were tall dwarfed the crowds that gathered to view them after the firestorms died down. Lod had designed these devices to tap into the geometrodynamic substructure of the planets and generate magravity. The zōtl endlessly strove to attack these sites, but humans now had the energy to fend off most of the spiders. In the years that followed, the zōtl fell back, held at bay with some of the humans’ first laser weapons. Technical teams from Towerbottom Library filled impact craters around the generators with power storage stations, converters, and transmitters. Soon, more energy flowed than the frantic human communities could use, and where cluttered, crude settlements had festered, glorious cities began to spire like crystals.
By the time Know-Where-to-Go plunged back into deep space, the magravity generators had transformed planets: Ras Mentis greened into an agricultural kingdom by tapping aquifers to irrigate its desert basins; Ioli constructed beautiful seacliff cities and funded development of colonial economies on impoverished Ren and Sakai; and Cendre promoted industries, investing all its power in factories and clever robotics, called psybots. The psybots elevated Cendre to the most prosperous of the planets, since every human settlement needed laborers and warriors and psybots made the best of both. The wealth that accrued from these popular exports built the worlds’ largest cities where there had been only swamp, and put into orbit goliath space stations and battle platforms.
Cendre wisely protected her industries with space-based defenders, for the zōtl had not relented in their ambition to subdue humankind. The zōtl destroyed generators on Elphame and Xappur, the last with the help of Saor cultists who believed the devices would further enslave people to Gai, the World Eater.
Pleased that at least three of the generators remained functional, Gai had fulfilled the first part of her pledge to Reena Patai. Lod, who managed the operation, had even used the impacts of the five comets to augment the gravity amp. He did not disguise his pride at this accomplishment or his eagerness to further help Gai. Together they would attempt to access Genitrix and shut down her production of lifeforms or at least of humans. But the effort would require working in their Forms, possibly for two days—more than five centuries planet time—their longest absence from the worlds.
Gai hoped that her efforts would win back for her complete control of Genitrix. She still had nightmare-flashes of her fellow Rimstalker, Ylan, transfixed by the agony of a zōtl pithing, and fear polluted her rest periods with nightmares of falling under the proton-torches of the spiders.
The search for the O’ode had widened since the advent of the psybots. Free of the fear of sacrificing human lives, Reena, whom Gai had insisted oversee the search, equipped psybots with compact ramstat flyers that carried probes deeper into the Overworld, to a time when Rataros had been accessible. That deep into the Overworld, timelines of the first Earth appeared, and Reena got absorbed in analyzing film clips of the blue planet when Gai rose from her Form to warn that a new and inhuman sentience had been detected on Cendre.
The Ordo Vala, who had schools on each of the worlds and who still distributed the Glyph Astra (though city dwellers considered the manual outmoded), had reported encountering psybots almost indi
stinguishable from humans. Reena’s inquiries had been answered by abstruse scientific papers about a current advance in psybernetics called Crystal Mind. Everyone from the Ordo Vala whom Reena sent to inquire into this new machine intelligence got elaborately deflected. After Gai’s warning, Reena decided to go to Cendre herself and confront the industrialist responsible for creating Crystal Mind, if to accomplish nothing else than to reassure Gai that psybot factories would continue to produce the Overworld probes necessary to find the O’ode. Without that assurance, Reena knew, the Rimstalker would have no use for the humans—except as zōtl bait.
*
Radha Namdev, not short nor tall, neither fat nor thin, dressed head-to-toe in silk—green turban, black neckband, stiff-collared gray jacket buttoned to his throat, black pajamas, and emerald shoes with curled toes. He showed only his hands, spatulate and strong, and his face, olive-skinned with brisk, shiny black whiskers that hackle-fanned the long line of his jaw and stuck out from under his aquiline nose in a rigid mustache. When he smiled, which was often, he showed even, shiny teeth. The wealthiest individual in Chalco-Doror for over a century, he accepted that the legendary Strong Mother would come to his palace – but why so on this particular drizzly morning he could not ascertain. Her tightlipped circle seemed impervious to espionage and bribery.
From the courtyard, where Reena had left her flyer and, out of courtesy, her bodyguards, a glossy-haired woman in a blue sari escorted the Strong Mother to a glass elevator that lifted them to the palace roof. Reena stepped through fern boughs screening the rooftop garden and spotted Radha Namdev pacing moodily. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she greeted.
Namdev stopped and faced her, frowning, face dark as the stormclouds in the sky beyond him—until the woman in the sari introduced Reena. Then his frown relaxed, and he stared in open disbelief at the young woman with sun-streaked hair, striding toward him with a look in her pale eyes sad as a wish. The next moment, he smiled broadly and stepped to greet her, arms thrown open, eyes gleaming with sudden admiration. “You are the Strong Mother? You, the founder of the Ordo Vala, author of the Glyph Astra?” He took her in a gentle embrace, smelled the ozone taint of lynk-passage in her hair. “I had expected a far older woman.”
“I am an old woman, Sur Namdev,” Reena admitted with a tight smile. “I am three hundred and sixty-eight years old.”
He stepped back amazed and regarded her slender figure, gracefully highlighted by the expert tailoring of the Ordo Vala’s crisp blue fatigues, the silver piping of outside seams tracing the contours of her youth. “You are stunning testimony to the efficacy of ion-flush therapy. I have been contemplating treating myself—but I am only a youngster of a hundred and thirty. Here—let me offer you some comfort in my little garden. Something to drink? Wine? Sharbat? Or would you prefer a vapor?”
“No, thank you. Nothing to drink or inhale. I have come to talk with you about something urgent.”
“Ah, I should have expected. The Strong Mother is not one who would make a nonchalant social call. You, after all, are responsible for searching out the O’ode. Please, sit down here beside this dwarf wind-apple. Its fragrance enchants. I say this tree is much like a woman—delicate of appearance yet hardy, a good survivor.”
“Survival, in fact, is what I have come to talk to you about,” Reena concurred and settled into a flexform under the blue-blossoms of the fragrant wind-apple. From where she sat, she could see past potted plants and through enclosing glass walls to the raingray exterior. The drear marshes of Cendre lay flat to the horizon, where a line of factories sent tendrils of black smoke into the sky.
“We have been surviving very well indeed since the Glyph Astra has helped to unite us as a people.”
Her stare did not flinch at the blatant flattery. “The Glyph Astra is about survival and freedom—not dependent survival, which is slavery no matter how comfortable.”
Namdev cocked an eyebrow, waited for her to go on.
“You are a great man, Sur Namdev,” she noted, breaking her penetrating stare to nod deferentially. “You began as just another corpse remanded from the ancient past by Genitrix. I understand from your autobiography that you were a weaver in Calcutta in the fourteenth century. You’ve adapted well to life in Chalco-Doror. I was personally pleased to learn that you received your scientific training from the Ordo Vala. You studied at the Valan School here on Cendre when it was still a bunker under zōtl siege. You learned the sciences well and went on to make major contributions in the development of mindflex. What a truly remarkable thing—crystal holography of human behavior patterns.”
Namdev hooded his eyes demurely. “I am moved that you know so much about me. You are the most widely respected woman in all the worlds.”
“And who doesn’t respect the man who invented mindflex? You almost singlehandedly created psybots—the warobots that fight the zōtl for us and die in our places, the handroids who labor in our factories and fields and tend us in our homes. You have enriched all our lives.”
“I am grateful for your kind words, Strong Mother—but what has this to do with what is so urgent to our survival that you must put aside your own dire search through the Overworld to visit with me?”
“It is important for you to know that I honor the benefits you have given the people. Clearly, you have enriched yourself from your efforts—but that does not diminish the great good you have accomplished by manufacturing mindflex servants. I am reminding you of all you have built because you are risking it and may lose it all if you do not stop development of the Crystal Mind.”
Radha Namdev blinked with surprise. “No secrets from the Ordo Vala, eh?”
“Crystal Mind is dangerous to our survival as humans. You must stop.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Namdev dismissed with a toss of his head. “Crystal Mind will be enormously more beneficial to humanity than all the psybots Cendre’s factories could ever manufacture put together.”
“I have been informed on excellent authority that what you say is not so.”
“What authority is so excellent, my dear, that it can call into question the very evolution of mind?”
“Gai herself.”
“Gai? You mean that distort from primeval times that wanted everyone to believe she had created all the worlds? Surely, Strong Mother, you don’t believe in such fairy tales?” He hushed her response with a vigorous wagging of hands. “Listen to me, please. Crystal Mind is the next logical step in psybernetics—a huge step up from the menials of warobots and handroids. Crystal Mind is sapience itself, the essence of sentience, the very pure mind that our own glutinous brains have been blundering toward from the grimy start of evolution. Would you deny us this majestic next step in our human destiny?”
“Gai thinks that the waveforms that Crystal Mind will pull in from the tesseract-field will not be human—nor very sympathetic to simians in general.”
“Waveforms? What waveforms? Crystal Mind generates its own psyberant patterns. And what is this tesseract-field you speak of but a myth? No one has ever seen it.”
“There are people alive today who spoke to the dead at the t-field monitor on Vala. I am one of them.”
Namdev smiled with forbearance. “The zōtl destroyed the so-called t-field monitor three hundred and fifty years ago. You must have been in Chalco-Doror less than twenty years. What did you know then of these worlds and the Tryl artifacts strewn among them? Who knows who you really spoke with in that dimly lit dome. How do you know the voices came from this mythic t-field?”
“I was shown the whole apparatus—the megafine wiring of the dome, denser than the brain’s dendrites—”
“You saw hardware you did not understand. No one understands anything more of the Tryl technology than what they taught us—and they taught us nothing about the t-field. Why put your faith in such lore when we are about to make a leap forward in true mentation?”
Reena cocked her head inquisitively. “You mentioned earlier that you think Gai is some kind of dist
ort. Don’t you believe that she is a Rimstalker?”
“From another gravity shell? Oh, my dear, how unlikely that would be. Why don’t you interpret what evidence is before us in the most simple and direct fashion.”
“By which you conclude—what?”
“I have a theory—not as wild as Gai’s claim to originate at a distance in smallness from us that is tinier than quarks!—a distance proportionally greater than the distance from here to the quasars! My theory is wild but not absurd. I believe that Know-Where-to-Go harbors a society of distorts, who have usurped Tryl technology and use it to dominate the worlds. These distorts pretend to be godlike Lod and Saor and mysterious Gai. Ha! The distort lords are puppet-masters, and the Ordo Vala and the Saor-priests are in competition for control of Chalco-Doror once the zōtl are checked.”
Reena sat deeper in the flexform, weighted with disbelief. “Namdev—Lod and Saor are machine intelligences and Gai a Rimstalker. Chalco-Doror is their spaceship. Where else do you think these worlds came from?”
“Be reasonable, my dear. A mentally powerful distort could project hallucinations and make you believe anything—even that the worlds—two entire planetary systems!—are a spaceship! How absurd!”
“You offer no other likelihoods.”
“Evolution. In the billions of years since our Earth was destroyed in the sun’s nova, this binary has formed new worlds, incorporating the debris of the old. Among that debris were the Tryl, who had placed themselves in suspended animation, awaiting this time. Genitrix is their invention, perhaps to restock the worlds, perhaps for research. The predatory zōtl came and extincted the peace-loving Tryl, leaving their technology to be exploited by psychically powerful distorts.”
Reena leered with incredulity. She had to remind herself that the knowledge Lod had imprinted in her brain was not a deception, that she had walked the Overworld, had known a 5-space being, had lived on the source world—long ago, yes, long ago on Earth—but truth, like light, did not diminish with time. Earth was real, still, in her and in every human life of these extravagant worlds.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 23
