by Дэн Симмонс
The colonists were too few and too busy with other projects to work full-time on such a wall, but they programmed robots and decanted androids from their seedship vaults to carry out the labor.
Aenea and her friends joined in this project, working for six standard months as the wall took shape and began its relentless march along the base of the highlands and the edge of the grasslands.
“A. Bettik found two of his siblings there,” said Aenea softly.
“My God,” I whispered. I had almost forgotten. When we were on Sol Draconi Septem some years ago, sitting by the warmth of a heating cube in Father Glaucus’s book-lined study inside a skyscraper that, in turn, was frozen within the eternal glacier of that world’s frozen atmosphere… A. Bettik had talked about one of his reasons for coming on the odyssey with the child, Aenea, and me: he was hoping against logic to find his four siblings—three brothers and a sister. They had been separated shortly after their training period as children—if an android’s accelerated early years could be called “childhood.”
“So he found them?” I said, marveling.
“Two of them,” repeated Aenea. “One of the other males in his growth créche—A. Antibbe—and his sister, A. Darria.”
“Were they like him?” I asked. The old poet had used androids in his empty city of Endymion, but I had not paid much attention to any of them except A. Bettik. Too much had been happening too fast.
“Much like him,” said Aenea. “But very different, as well. Perhaps he will tell you more.”
She wrapped up her story. After six standard months working on the linear city wall on Groombridge Dyson D, they had had to leave.
“Had to leave?” I said. “The Pax?”
“The Commission for Justice and Peace, to be precise,” said Aenea. “We did not want to leave, but we had no choice.”
“What is the Commission for Justice and Peace?” I said. Something about the way she had pronounced the words made the hairs on my arm stand up.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“All right,” I said, “but explain something else now.”
Aenea nodded and waited.
“You say you spent five standard months on Ixion,” I said. “Three months on Maui-Covenant, six months on Renaissance Vector, three months on Patawpha, four standard months on Amritsar, about six standard months on—what was it?—Groombridge Dyson D?”
Aenea nodded.
“And you’ve been here about a standard year you say?”
“Yes.”
“That’s only thirty-nine standard months,” I said. “Three standard years and three months.”
She waited. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but I realized that she was not going to smile… it looked more as if she was trying to avoid crying. Finally, she said, “You were always good at math, Raul.”
“My trip here took five years’ time-debt,” I said softly. “So that’s about sixty standard months for you, but you’ve only accounted for thirty-nine. Where are the missing twenty-one standard months, kiddo?”
I saw the tears in her eyes. Her mouth was quavering slightly, but she tried to speak in a light tone. “It was sixty-two standard months, one week, and six days for me,” she said. “Five years, two months, and one day time-debt on the ship, about four days accelerating and decelerating, and eight days’ travel time. You forgot your travel time.”
“All right, kiddo,” I said, seeing the emotion well in her. Her hands were shaking. “Do you want to talk about the missing… what was it?”
“Twenty-three months, one week, and six hours,” she said. Almost two standard years, I thought. And she doesn’t want to tell me what happened to her during that time. I had never seen her exercise such rigid control before; it was as if she were trying to hold herself together physically against some terrible centrifugal force.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, pointing out the open doorway at the cliff face to the west of the Temple. “Look.”
I could just make out figures—two-legged and four-legged—on the narrow ledge. They were still several klicks away along the cliff face.
I walked over to my pack, retrieved my binoculars, and studied the forms.
“The pack animals are zygoats,” said Aenea. “The porters are hired in Phari Marketplace and will be returning in the morning. See anyone familiar?”
I did. The blue face in the hooded chuba looked much the way it had five of his years earlier. I turned back to Aenea, but she was obviously finished talking about her missing two years. I allowed her to change the subject again.
Aenea began asking me questions then and we were still talking when A. Bettik arrived. The women—Rachel and Theo—wandered in a few minutes later. One of the tatami mats folded back to reveal a cooking brazier in the floor near the open wall, and Aenea and A. Bettik began cooking for everyone. Others wandered in and were introduced—the foremen George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu, two sisters who were in charge of much of the decorative railing work—Kuku and Kay Se, Gyalo Thondup in his formal silken robes and Jigme Taring in soldier’s garb, the teaching monk Chim Din and his master, Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, abbot of the gompa at the Temple Hanging in Air, a female monk named Donka Nyapso, a traveling trade agent named Tromo Trochi of Dhomu, Tsipon Shakabpa who was the Dalai Lama’s overseer of construction here at the Temple, and the famed climber and paraglide flyer Lhomo Dondrub, who was perhaps the most striking man I had ever seen and—I later discovered—one of the few flyers who would drink beer or break bread with Dugpas, Drukpas, or Drungpas.
The food was tsampa and momo—a roasted barley mixed into zygoat-buttered tea, forming a paste that one rolled into balls and ate with other balls of steamed dough holding mushrooms, cold zygoat tongue, sugared bacon, and bits of pears that A. Bettik told me were from the fabled gardens of Hsi wang-mu. More people came in as the bowls were being handed out—Labsang Samten—who, A. Bettik whispered, was the older brother of the current Dalai Lama and was now in his third year of monkhood here at the Temple, and various Drungpas from the wooded clefts—including master carpenter Changchi Kenchung with his long, waxed mustaches, Perri Samdup, an interpreter, and Rimsi Kyipup, a brooding and unhappy young scaffold-rigger. Not all of the monks who dropped in that night were descended from the Chinese/tibetan Old Earth seedship colonists. Laughing and lifting their rough mugs of beer with us were the fearless high riggers Haruyuki Otaki and Kenshiro Endo, the master bamboo workers Voytek Majer and Janusz Kurtyka, and the brickmakers Kim Byung-Soon and Viki Groselj. The mayor of Jo-kung, the nearest cliff city, was there—Charles Chi-kyap Kempo—who also served as Lord Chamberlain of all the Temple’s priest officials and was an appointed member of both the Tsongdu, the regional assembly of elders, and advisor to Yik-Tshang, literally the “Nest of Letters,” the secret four-person body that reviewed the monks’ progress and appointed all priests. Charles Chi-kyap Kempo was the first member of our party to drink enough to pass out.
Chim Din and several of the other monks dragged the snoring man away from the edge of the platform and left him sleeping in the corner.
There were others—at least forty people must have filled the little pagoda as the last of the sunlight ebbed away and the moonlight from the Oracle and three of her siblings lit the cloudtops below—but I forgot their names that night as we ate tsampa and momo, drank beer in great quantities, and made the torches burn bright in Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. Some hours later that evening, I went out to relieve myself. A. Bettik showed me the way to the toilets.
I had assumed that one would just use the edge of platforms, but he assured me that on a world where dwelling structures had many levels—most of them above or below others—this was considered bad form. The toilets were built into the side of the cliff, enclosed by bamboo partitions, and the sanitary arrangements consisted of cleverly engineered pipes and sluices leading into fissures running deep into the cliff as well as washbasins cut in stone counters. There was even a shower area and solar-heated wate
r for washing.
When I had rinsed my hands and face and stepped back out onto the platform—the chill breeze helping to sober me a bit—I stood next to A. Bettik in the moonlight and looked into the glowing pagoda where the crowd had arranged itself in concentric circles with my young friend as the locus.
The laughter and chaos had disappeared. One by one, the monks and holy men and riggers and carpenters and stonemasons and gompa abbots and mayors and bricklayers were asking soft questions of the young woman, and she was answering.
The scene reminded me of something—some recent image—and it took me only a minute to recall it: the forty-AU deceleration into the star system, with the ship offering up holo representations of the G-type sun with its eleven orbiting planets, two asteroid belts, and countless comets. Aenea was definitely the sun in this system, and all of the men and women in that room were orbiting around her as surely as had the worlds, asteroids, and comets in the ship’s projection.
I leaned on a bamboo post and looked at A. Bettik in the moonlight. “She’d better be careful,” I said softly to the android, enunciating each word carefully, “or they’ll begin treating her like a god.”
A. Bettik nodded ever so slightly. “They do not think that M. Aenea is a god, M. Endymion,” he murmured.
“Good.” I put my arm around the android’s shoulder. “Good.”
“However,” he said, “many of them are becoming convinced, despite her best efforts to assure them otherwise, that she is God.”
17
The evening A. Bettik and I bring the news of the Pax’s arrival, Aenea leaves her discussion group, comes to where we are standing at the door, and listens intently.
“Chim Din says that the Dalai Lama has allowed them to occupy the old gompa at Otter Lake,” I say, “in the shadow of the Shivling.”
Aenea says nothing.
“They won’t be allowed to use their flying machines,” I say, “but they’re free to walk anywhere in the province. Anywhere.”
Aenea nods.
I want to grab her and shake her. “That means they’ll hear about you soon, kiddo,” I say sharply. “There’ll be missionaries here within weeks—maybe days—spying around and sending word back to the Pax Enclave.” I let out a breath. “Shit, we’ll be lucky if it’s just missionaries and not troopers.”
Aenea is silent another minute. Then she says, “We’re already lucky that it’s not the Commission for Justice and Peace.”
“What’s that?” I say. She had mentioned them before.
She shakes her head. “Nothing that’s immediately relevant, Raul. They must have some business here other than… than stamping out unorthodoxy.”
During my first days here, Aenea had told me about the fighting going on in and around Pax space—a Palestinian revolt on Mars that had resulted in the Pax evacuating the planet and nuking it from orbit, free trader rebellions in the Lambert Ring Territories and on Mare Infinitus, continued fighting on Ixion and dozens of other worlds. Renaissance Vector, with its huge Pax Fleet bases and countless bars and bordellos, had been a hornets’ nest of rumors and inside intelligence. And because most of the ships of the line in Pax Fleet were now the Gideon-drive archangels, the news was usually only a few days old.
One of the most intriguing rumors that Aenea had heard before coming to T’ien Shan was that at least one of those archangel-class ships had gone rogue, escaped to Ouster space, and was now flashing into Pax space to attack convoys of Pax Mercantilus ships—disabling rather than destroying the crewed freighters—and to disrupt Pax Fleet task forces preparing to attack Ousters out beyond the Great Wall. There had been a rumor during Aenea’s and A. Bettik’s last weeks on Renaissance Vector that the fleet bases there were in danger. Other rumors suggested that large elements of the fleet were now being kept in Pacem System to defend the Vatican. Whatever else was true about the tales of the rogue ship Raphael, it was uncontestable that His Holiness’s Crusade against the Ousters had been set back years by the hit-and-run attacks.
But none of that seems important now as I stand waiting for Aenea’s response to this news of the Pax’s arrival on T’ien Shan. What do we do now, I wonder, farcast to her next world? Instead of discussing flight, Aenea says, “The Dalai Lama will have a formal ceremony to welcome the Pax officials.”
“So?” I say after a moment.
“So we have to make sure that we get an invitation,” she says. I doubt if my jaw is literally hanging slack, but it feels as if it is.
Aenea touches my shoulder. “I’ll take care of it,” she says. “I’ll talk to Charles Chi-kyap Kempo and Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi and make sure that they include us in any party invited to the ceremony.” I am literally speechless as she goes back to her discussion group and the silent throng, their faces expectant and placid in the soft lantern light. I read these words on microvellum, remember writing them in my last days in the Schrödinger cat box in orbit around Armaghast, remember writing them in the haste of certainty that the laws of probability and quantum mechanics would soon be releasing cyanide into my closed-cycle universe, and I marvel at the present tense of the narrative. Then I remember the reason for this choice.
When I was sentenced to death in the Schrödinger box—egg-shaped, actually—I was allowed to bring very few of my own things into terminal exile. My clothes were my own. On a whim, they had given me a small rug for the floor of my Schrödinger cell—it was an ancient rug, a bit less than two meters long and a meter wide, frayed, with a small cut missing at one end. It was a replica of the Consul’s hawking mat. I had lost the real mat on Mare Infinitus many years before and the details of how it came back to me still lie ahead in my tale. I had given the actual hawking mat to A. Bettik, but it must have amused my torturers to furnish my final cell with this useless copy of a flying carpet.
So they had allowed me my clothes, the fake hawking mat and the palm-sized diskey journal I had taken from the ship on T’ien Shan. The com-unit element of the journal had been disabled—not that it would broadcast through the energy shell of the Schrödinger box or that there was anyone for me to call—but the journal memory—after their careful study of it during my inquisition trial—had been left intact. It was on T’ien Shan that I had begun making notes and daily journal entries.
It was these notes that I had brought up onto the ’scriber screen in the Schrödinger cat box, reviewing them before writing this most personal of sections, and it was the immediacy in the notes, I believe, that led me to use the present-tense narrative. All of my memories of Aenea are vivid, but some of the memories brought back by these hurried entries at the end of a long day of work or adventure on T’ien Shan were so vital as to make me weep with renewed loss. I relived those moments as I wrote those words.
And some of her discussion groups were recorded verbatim on the diskey journal. I played those during my last days just to hear Aenea’s soft voice once again.
“Tell us about the TechnoCore,” one of the monks requests during the discussion hour this night of the Pax’s arrival. “Please tell us about the Core.”
Aenea hesitates only an instant, bowing her head slightly as if ordering her thoughts. “Once upon a time,” she begins. She always begins her long explanations this way. “Once upon a time,” says Aenea, “more than a thousand standard years ago, before the Hegira… before the Big Mistake of ’08… the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project… a great mass of silicon and ancient amplification, switching, and detection devices called transistors and chips and circuit boards… a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping—if you will pardon the expression—the human brain in form and function.
“Of course, AI’s did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.
“You have to imagine now, an Old Earth before humankind had offworld colonies. No Hawking
drive. No interplanetary flight to speak of. All of our eggs were literally in one carton, and that carton was the lovely blue and white water world of Old Earth.
“By the end of the twentieth century, Christian era, this little world had a crude datasphere. Basic planetary telecommunication had evolved into a decentralized swarm system of old silicon-based computers demanding no organization or hierarchy, demanding nothing beyond a common communications protocol. Creation of a distributed-memory hive mind was then inevitable.
“The earliest lineal ancestors to today’s Core personalities were not projects to create artificial intelligence, but incidental efforts to simulate artificial life. In the 1940’s, the great-grandfather of the TechnoCore—a mathematician named John von Neumann—had done all the proofs of artificial self-replication. As soon as the early silicon-based computers became small enough for individuals to play with, curious amateurs began practicing synthetic biology within the confines of these machines’ CPU cycles. Hyperlife—self-reproducing, information-storing, interacting, metabolizing, evolving—came into existence in the 1960’s. It escaped the tide pools of the individual machines in the last decade of that century, moving into the embryonic planetary datasphere that they called the Internet or the web.
“The earliest AI’s were dumb as dirt. Or perhaps the better metaphor would be that they were as dumb as early cellular life that was in the dirt. Some of the earliest hypercritters floating in the warm medium of the datasphere—which was also evolving—were 80-byte organisms inserted into a block of RAM in a virtual computer—a computer simulated by a computer. One of the first humans to release such creatures into the datasphere ocean was named Tom Ray and he was not an AI expert or computer programmer or cyberpuke, which they called hackers then—but was a biologist, an insect collector, botanist, and bird-watcher, and someone who had spent years collecting ants in the jungle for a pre-Hegira scientist named E. O. Wilson. Watching ants, Tom Ray became interested in evolution, and wondered if he could not just simulate evolution in one of the early computers but create real evolution there. None of the cyberpukes he spoke with were interested in the idea, so he taught himself computer programming. The cyberpukes said that evolving and mutating code sequences happened all the time in computers—they were called bugs and screwed-up programs. They said that if his code sequences evolved into something else they would almost certainly be nonfunctional, nonviable, as most mutations are, and would just foul up the operation of the computer software. So Tom Ray created a virtual computer—a simulated computer within his real computer—for his code-sequenced creations. And then he created an actual 80-byte code-sequence creature that could reproduce, die, and evolve in his computer-within-a-computer.
