I nodded. “Sel, while I was in upload, I dreamed.”
She didn’t tell me that was impossible. She closed her eyes, as if absorbing a blow. I described the dream, adding, “I think it wasn’t my dream. I think it was QUENTIAM’s. Upload is supposed to be a separate subprogram within It, but I think I was—in some very tiny, tiny way—beyond upload into merged state. Sel, I don’t think you should get another body.”
Her eyes remained closed, and her face grimaced in pain.
“I’m not saying that nanomachinery and even t-holes aren’t safe. Or if they’re not, it will be one finite explosion, like Haradil’s system or the Mori Core, and we’ll be dead before we even realize it. But the upload state, even the machine state . . .” I remembered Haradil saying, I was QUENTIAM.
“Yes,” Seliku said. “You’re right.”
“Once before I dreamed in upload, the same dream. It was the day you first told me about Haradil. So even then . . . even then.”
“Yes. You were just lucky about your body.” She opened her eyes and looked at it longingly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.
“Not your fault. Will you carry me to the Communion hall? I’m very tired.”
“Of course I will.”
Tenderly I carried my sister-self back to her work. It was almost like cradling a child. I saw that there must come a new relationship between me and my one remaining sister-self, physically frail on this planet but mentally leading a crusade to convince the galaxy of cataclysmic danger. I would be her protector, caretaker, aide. The change between us was permanent. Nothing would ever be the same again.
###
I was wrong. Many things are the same.
Seliku has been unable to convince the galaxy of her theory. She has won a few adherents among cosmologists, but for most people, the idea that QUENTIAM might be decaying, might be unreliable, is impossible to even consider. It’s like saying gravity is unreliable. Which, I suppose, might happen next. That would convince everybody, or at least everybody who survived it.
Meanwhile, some do not survive. There have been mistakes in vat nanos, creating bodies other than ordered, or killing the bodies before they were done. No one knows how many mistakes; I no longer trust QUENTIAM’s records.
A new quasar has appeared in the sky, and six supernovas, all outside our galaxy. They filled the sky, night after night, with brilliant light. Seliku says that is too many supernovas to be statistically random, but not even her colleagues all believe her. She works night and day to find the evidence, physical or experimental or mathematical, that may convince them. Her big question is this: Is the unseen other universe just brushing ours in passing, creating supernovas and quasars and small reconfigurations of spacetime that also change and reconfigure QUENTIAM? Or are the two universes set for a full collision, from which neither will emerge without changes so fundamental that basic particles themselves are affected, and all life ceases?
The Arlbenists were wrong, in ways they could never have foreseen when Arlbeni created his Divine Mission over a hundred thousand years ago. We were never alone in the galaxy, and not only because spores have drifted in from beyond its edges and seeded non-DNA-based life here. Even without that panspermia, we were not alone. Humans were already everywhere because QUENTIAM, our collective and historical selves, filled spacetime. And we weren’t alone in a much more profound sense.
I have suggested another question to Seliku, as well. Is it possible that the other universe, too, has a membrane like QUENTIAM, but more advanced? And that It knows what It’s doing in probing ours? On ˄17843, Seliku likened our brushes with the other universe to stones dropping in a pond. Dropped stones sometimes have droppers. Seliku dismisses this question, not because it’s completely stupid but because for that there really is no evidence. But I know she can imagine it. She is my sister-self, still, and sister-self to artists as well. She can imagine a Dropper of stones into the cosmic well between universes.
What is It, or Them, like? Do they guess what effects their experiments have on us?
None of this speculation reaches the Arlbenists, who still blithely seed worlds in the egocentric belief that only humans can create life. I, however, no longer correct and adjust Arlbenist seedings on other worlds. I won’t risk the vat rooms necessary for that. And I have my own work here, now, both in aiding Seliku in her all-important fight and in caring for her. Her nanomeds keep her healthy, but her body is not meant for this planet and is not doing well here. It doesn’t, surprisingly, bother me that I never leave Calyx. This is, finally, home, here with my new work and my sister-self. I am learning to grow a garden of edible plants, without nanos and without QUENTIAM, just in case. In a weird way, I’m not uncontent.
Not that Calyx looks the same, either. A new artist received the design privilege when Bej and Camy’s franchise ended. His name is Kiibceroti, and he has made of Calyx a serene, spare city. Gone are the gorgeous lush flowers, replaced by gentle curves of sand in soft pastels, with perhaps one dark rock placed precisely at the edge of the curve and a single tall fern. I don’t much like the ferns, or the overall design. But I admit that it’s beautiful in its own way. There is something melancholy about it, something of grief. Someone told me that Kiibceroti lost a brother-self in the Mori Core, but I don’t know if that’s true. I could ask QUENTIAM, but I ask QUENTIAM very little these days.
One good thing about Kiibceroti’s city: All that low-key tranquility is good for dreaming. I dream now, nearly every night. Last night I dreamed of Bej and Camy.
I dreamed they had joined the settlement of prisoners on ˄17843, somehow making peace with them, finding companionship and working together to create whatever good exists on that pulpy moon. Bej and Camy cut their arms and shared the nanomeds from their bodies, and the fungi disappeared from everyone’s heads and feet. None of them would die.
Then I saw Bej and Camy walking on a seashore with their friends, all approaching some large object in the distance. In the dream, I walked with them. As we neared the object, I saw that it was a great boulder thrown up by the sea millennia ago. Camy and Bej had painstakingly chipped away at it over vast amounts of time, using other sharp stones and their own artistic talent. They had polished the stone with sand and the statue shone in the sunlight with bits of mica and quartz. It was Haradil, smiling and happy, solid by the blue sea for as long as the waves permitted the sculpture to last.
“Alo?” Seliku said sleepily beside me.
I laid my tentacles protectively across her body and moved slightly to nestle closer to her. “I’m here, sister-self. Go back to sleep. We’re still here.”
THOUSANDTH NIGHT
By Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big books that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His most recent book is a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. Coming up is a new novel, Chasing Janus. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.
Here he takes us to a distant future where our remote descendants have become immortal supermen who possess the powers of gods, for a riveting tale of murder and intrigue that proves that even for those who have everything, there’s always a little bit more to reach for that’s hanging just out of reach . . .
###
It was the afternoon before my threading, and stomach butterflies were doing their best to unsettle me. I had little appetite and less small talk. All I wanted was for the next twenty-four hours to slip by so that it could be someone else’s turn to sweat. Etiquette forbade it, but there was nothing I’d have preferred t
han to flee back to my ship and put myself to sleep until morning. Instead I had to grin and bear it, just as everyone else had to when their night came around.
Waves crashed a kilometre below, dashing against the bone-white cliffs, the spray cutting through one of the elegant suspension bridges that linked the main island to the smaller ones surrounding it. Beyond the islands, the humped form of an aquatic crested the waves. I made out the tiny dots of people frolicking on the bridge, dancing in the spray. It had been my turn to design the venue for this carnival, and I thought I’d made a tolerable job of it.
A pity none of it would last.
In little over a year machines would pulverise the islands, turning their spired buildings into powdery rubble. The sea would have pulled them under by the time the last of our ships had left the system. But even the sea would only last a few thousand years after that. I’d steered water-ice comets onto this arid world just to make its oceans. The atmosphere itself was dynamically unstable. We could breathe it now, but there was no biomass elsewhere on Reunion to replenish the oxygen we were turning into carbon dioxide. In twenty thousand years the world would be uninhabitable to all but the hardiest microorganisms. It would stay like that for the better part of another hundred and eighty thousand years, until our return.
By then the scenery would be someone else’s problem, not mine. On Thousandth Night—the final evening of the reunion—the person who had threaded the most acclaimed strand would be charged with designing the venue for the next gathering. Depending on their plans, they’d arrive between one thousand and ten thousand years before the official opening of the next gathering.
My hand tightened on the rail at the edge of the high balcony as I heard urgent footsteps approach from behind. High hard heels on marble, the swish of an evening gown.
“Don’t tell me, Campion. Nerves.”
I turned around, greeting Purslane—beautiful, regal Purslane—with a stiff smile and a grunt of acknowledgement. “Mm. How did you guess?”
“Intuition,” she said. “Actually, I’m surprised you’re here at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“When it’s my turn I’m sure I’ll still be on my ship, furiously re-editing until the last possible moment.”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I’ve done all the editing I need. There’s nothing to edit. Nothing of any consequence has happened to me since the last time.”
Purslane fixed me with a knowing smile. Her hair was bunched and high, sculpted like a fairytale palace with spires and turrets. “Typical false modesty.” She pushed a glass of red wine into my hand before I could refuse.
“Well, this time there’s nothing false about it. My thread is going to be a crashing anti-climax. The sooner we get over it, the better.”
“It’s going to be that dull?”
I sipped at the wine. “The very exemplar of dullness. I’ve had a spectacularly uneventful two hundred thousand years.”
“You said exactly the same thing last time, Campion. Then you showed us wonders and miracles. You were the hit of the reunion.”
“Maybe I’m getting old,” I said, “but this time I felt like taking things a little bit easier. I made a conscious effort to keep away from inhabited worlds; anywhere there was the least chance of something exciting happening. I watched a lot of sunsets.”
“Sunsets,” she said.
“Mainly solar-type stars. Under certain conditions of atmospheric calm and viewing elevation you can sometimes see a flash of green just before the star slips below the horizon . . .” I trailed off lamely, detesting the sound of my own voice. “All right. It’s just scenery.”
“Two hundred thousand years of it?”
“I’m not repentant. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
Purslane sighed and shook her head: I was her hopeless case, and she didn’t mind if I knew it. “I didn’t see you at the orgy this morning. I was going to ask what you thought of Tormentil’s strand.”
Tormentil’s memories, burned into my mind overnight, still had an electric brightness about them. “The usual self-serving stuff,” I said. “Ever noticed that all the adventures he embroils himself in always end up making him look wonderful, and everyone else a bit thick?”
“True. This time even his usual admirers have been tut-tutting behind his back.”
“Serves him right.”
Purslane looked out to sea, through the thicket of hovering ships parked around the tight little archipelago. A layer of cloud had formed during the afternoon, with the ships—most of them stationed nose down—piercing it like daggers. There were nearly a thousand of them. The view resembled an inverted landscape: a sea of fog, interrupted by the sleek, luminous spires of tall buildings.
“Asphodel’s ship still hasn’t been sighted,” Purslane said. “It’s looking as if she won’t make it.”
“Do you think she’s dead?”
Purslane dipped her head. “I think it’s a possibility. That last strand of hers . . . a lot of risk-taking.”
Asphodel’s strand, delivered during the last reunion, had been full of death-defying sweeps past lethal phenomena. What had seemed beautiful then—a whiplashing binary star, or a detonating nova—must have finally reached out and killed her. Killed one of us.
“I liked Asphodel,” I said absently. “I’ll be sorry if she doesn’t make it. Maybe she’s just delayed.”
“Why don’t you come inside and stop moping?” Purslane said, edging me away from the balcony. “It’s not good for you.”
“I’m not really in the mood.”
“Honestly, Campion. I’m sure you’re going to startle us tonight.”
“That depends,” I said, “on how much you like sunsets.”
###
That night my memories were threaded into the dreams of the other guests. Come morning most of them managed to say something vaguely complimentary about my strand, but beneath the surface politeness their bemused disappointment was all too obvious. It wasn’t just that my memories had added nothing startling to the whole. What really annoyed them was that I’d apparently gone out of my way to have as dull a time as possible. The implication was that I’d let the side down by looking for pointless green flashes rather than adventure; that I’d deliberately sought to add nothing useful to the tapestry of our collective knowledge. By the afternoon, my patience was wearing perilously thin.
“Well, at least you won’t be on the edge of your seat come Thousandth Night,” said Samphire, an old acquaintance in the line. “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Deliberate dullness, to take you out of the running for best strand.”
“That wasn’t the idea at all,” I said testily. “Still, if you think it was dull . . . that’s your prerogative. When’s your strand, Samphire? I’ll be sure to offer my heartfelt congratulations when everyone else is sticking the boot in.”
“Day eight hundred,” he said easily. “Plenty of time to study the opposition and make a few judicious alterations.” Samphire sidled a bit too close for comfort. I had always found Samphire cloying, but I tolerated his company because his strands were usually memorable. He had a penchant for digging through the ruins of ancient human cultures, looting their tombs for quaint technologies, grisly weapons, and machine minds driven psychotic by two million years of isolation. “So anyway,” he said, conspiratorially. “Thousandth Night. Thousandth Night. Can’t wait to see what you’ve got lined up for us.”
“Nor can I.”
“What’s it going to be? You can’t do a Cloud Opera, if that’s what you’ve planned. We had one of those last time.”
“Not a very good one though.”
“And the time before that—what was it?”
“A re-creation of a major space battle, I think. Effective, if a little on the brash side.”
“Yes, I remember now. Didn’t Fescue’s ship mistake it for a real battle? Dug a ten-kilometre-wide crater into the crust when his scree
ns went up. The silly fool had his defence thresholds turned down too low.” Unfortunately, Fescue was in earshot. He looked at us over the shoulder of the line member he was talking to, shot me a warning glance then returned to his conversation. “Anyway,” Samphire continued, oblivious, “what do you mean, you can’t wait? It’s your show, Campion. Either you’ve planned something or you haven’t.”
I looked at him pityingly. “You’ve never actually won best strand, have you?”
“Come close, though . . . my strand on the Homunculus Wars . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind. What’s your point?”
“My point is that sometimes the winner elects to suppress their memories of exactly what form the Thousandth Night celebrations will take.”
Samphire touched a finger to his nose. “I know you, Campion. It’ll be tastefully restrained . . . and very, very dull.”
“Good luck with your strand,” I said icily.
Samphire left me. I thought I’d have a few moments alone, but no sooner had I turned to admire the view than Fescue leaned against the balustrade next to me, swilling a glass of wine. He held the glass by the stem, in jewelled and ringed fingers.
“Enjoying yourself, Campion?” he asked, in his usual deep-voiced, paternalistic, faintly disapproving way. The wind flicked iron-grey hair from his aristocratic brow.
“Yes, actually. Aren’t you?”
“It’s not a matter of enjoyment. Not for some of us, at any rate. There’s work to be done during these reunions—serious business, of great importance to the future status of the line.”
“Lighten up,” I said under my breath.
Fescue and I had never seen eye to eye. Among the nine hundred and ninety-three surviving members of the line, there were two or three dozen who exerted special influence. Though we had all been created at the same time, these figures had cultured a quiet superiority, distancing themselves from the more frivolous aspects of a reunion. Their body plans and clothes were studiedly formal. They spent a lot of time standing around in grave huddles, shaking their heads at the rest of us. They had the strongest ties to external lines. Many of them were Advocates, like Fescue himself.
One Million A.D. Page 24
