by Дэн Симмонс
And so they did. Using the most advanced methods of nanotechnology—methods quashed on Old Earth and the early Hegemony by the TechnoCore—these human beings adapted themselves to wildly inhospitable worlds and to the even less hospitable dark spaces between worlds and stars. Within centuries, the use of Hawking-drive had spread to most of these far-flung Swarms of Ouster colonists, but their urge to find other worlds had faded. What they now wanted was to continue to adapt—to allow all of Old Earth’s orphans to adapt—to whatever conditions the place and space offered them.
And with this new mission grew their philosophy… our philosophy, almost religious in fervor, of spreading life throughout the galaxy… throughout the universe. Not just human life… not just Old Earth life-forms… but life in all of its infinite and complex variations.
A few of our visitors here tonight may not know that the end goal of both us Ousters and our Templar brethren is not just the Biosphere Startree which we can see above us even as we speak… but a day in which air and water and life shall fill almost all of the space between the Startree and the yellow sun we see burning above us.
The Brotherhood of the Muir and our loose confederations of Ousters want nothing less than to turn the surface, seas, and atmosphere of every world around every star green with life. More than that, we work to see the galaxy grow green… tendrils reaching to nearby galaxies… superstrings of life.
One by-product of this philosophy, and the reason that the Church and the Pax seek to destroy us, is that for centuries we have been tailoring human evolution to fit the demands the environment gives us. So far, there are no distinct and separate species of humankind different than Homo sapiens—that is, all of us here could, if both parties were willing, interbreed with any Pax human or Templar human. But the differences are growing, the genetic separation widening. Already there are forms of Ouster humanity so different that we border on new human species… and those differences are passed along genetically to our offspring.
This the Church cannot abide. And so we are engaged in this terrible war, deciding whether humankind must remain one species forever, or whether our celebration of diversity in the universe can be allowed to continue.
Aenea. Thank you, Freewoman Sian Quintana Ka’an. I am sure that this has been helpful for my friends who are new to Ouster space, as well as important for the rest of us to remember as we make these momentous decisions. Does anyone else wish to speak?
Dalai Lama. Friend Aenea, I have a comment and a question of you. The Pax’s promise of immortality seduced even me in considering—for a few moments only—converting to their Christian faith. All here love life, it is the bright thread of our commonality. Can you tell us why the cruciform is bad for us? And I must say—the fact that it is a symbiote or parasite does not make it that unthinkable to me or many others. Our bodies have many life-forms—the bacteria in our gut, for instance—which feed off us yet allow us to live. Friend Aenea, what is the cruciform? And why should we shun it?
Aenea (closes her eyes for only a second, sighs, and opens them to face the boy). Your Holiness, the cruciform was born out of the TechnoCore’s desperation following Meina Gladstone’s attack on them in the hours before the Fall of the Farcasters. The TechnoCore, as I have discussed with all of you in different forums, lives and thinks only as a parasite. In that sense, humankind has long been a symbiotic partner of the Core. Our technology was created and limited by Core designs. Our societies have been created, altered, and destroyed by Core plans and Core fears. Our existence as human beings has largely been defined by the endless dance of fear and parasitism with the Core AI entities.
After the Fall, after the Core lost control of the Hegemony via its dataspheres and farcasters, after the Core lost its greatest computing engine—its direct parasitism on the billions of human brains as they transited the Void Which Binds via the so-called farcasters—the TechnoCore had to find a new way to exploit humankind. And it had to find it quickly. Thus the cruciform. This is nanotechnology at its most refined and most injurious.
Where our Ouster friends use advanced genetic engineering combined with nanotechnology to advance the cause of life in the universe, the TechnoCore uses it to advance the cause of Core hyperparasitism.
Each cruciform is made up of billions of Core-connected nanotech entities, each in contact with other cruciforms and the Core via a terrible misuse of the Void Which Binds medium. The TechnoCore has known of the Void for a millennium and used it—misused it—for almost as long. The so-called Hawking drive tore holes in the Void. Then farcasters ripped at the essential fabric of the Void. The Core-driven information meta-sphere and instantaneous fatline medium stole information from the Void Which Binds in ways that blinded entire races, destroyed millennia of memories. But it is the cruciform that is the Core’s most cynical and terrible misuse of the Void medium.
What makes the cruciform seem most miraculous to most of us is not its ability to restore some form of life—technology has offered variations of that for centuries—but its ability to restore the personality and memories of the deceased person. When one realizes that this demands information storage capabilities in excess of 6 by 10 to the 23rd power bytes for each human resurrected, the fact of cruciform seems truly miraculous. Those in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church who know the Core’s secret role in all resurrections ascribe this staggering—impossible—computing power to the Core’s megasphere storage potential.
But the Core has nowhere near that computing power. Indeed, even in the heyday of the Ultimates’ attempt to create the perfect artificial computing entity, the Ultimate Intelligence, the analyzer of all variables, no AI or series of AI’s in the Core had the ability to store sufficient bytes for even one human body-personality to be recorded and resurrected. In fact, even if the Core had such information storage capability, it would never have the energy necessary to re-form atoms and molecules into the precise living entity that is the body of a human being, much less reproduce the intricate waveform dance that is a human personality. Resurrection of a single person was and remains impossible for the Core.
That is, it was impossible unless they further ravaged the Void Which Binds—that transtemporal, interstellar medium for the memory and emotions of all sentient races. Which the Core did without a backward glance.
It is the Void Which Binds that records the individual wave-front personalities of those humans wearing cruciforms… the cruciform itself is little more than a Core-spawned nanotech data-transfer device.
But every time a person is resurrected, parts of thousands of personalities—human and otherwise—are erased from the more permanent record that is the Void Which Binds. Those of you who have taken communion with me, who have learned the language of the dead and of the living, who have attempted to hear the music of the spheres and have pondered the potential of taking that first step through the Void Which Binds, you understand the terrible savagery this vandalism represents. It must stop. I must stop it. (Aenea closes her eyes for a long moment, then opens them again and continues.) But this is not the only evil of the cruciform.
I say again, the Core AI entities are parasites. They cannot stop themselves from being parasites. Besides providing control of humanity via the Church—and, if all else fails, by administering pain to individuals via the cruciforms—there is another reason the AI’s have offered humanity resurrection via these cruciform parasites.
With the Fall of the Farcasters, the use of trillions of human neurons in the Core’s ultimate datasphere-connected Ultimate Intelligence effort was interrupted.
Without the ruse of the farcasters by which to attach themselves like leeches on human brains, to steal the very life energy of neurons and holistic wave fronts from their human hosts, to hook billions of human minds into parallel computing devices, the Ultimate Intelligence project had to stop. With the cruciforms, this parasitism on the human brain has been resumed.
But it is now more complex than mere dataspace connections of billions of h
uman minds in parallel for the Core’s purposes. Centuries ago—as far back as the twentieth century A.D.—human researchers dealing with similar neural networks comprised of pre-AI silicon intelligences discovered that the best way to make a neural network creative was to kill it. In those dying seconds—even in the last nanoseconds of a sentient or near-sentient conscience’s existence—the linear, essentially binary processes of neural net computing jumped barriers, became wildly creative in the near-death liberation from off-on, binary-based processing.
War-game computer simulations as far back as the late twentieth century showed that dying neural nets made unexpected but highly creative decisions: a primitive, presentient AI controlling a battered seagoing fleet in a simulated war game, for instance, suddenly sank its own damaged ships so that the remnants of its fleet could escape. Such was the genius of dying, nonlinear, neural-net creativity.
The Core has always lacked such creativity. Essentially, it has the linear, serial architecture of the serial CPU’s from which it evolved, coupled with the obsessive, noncreative mentality of the ultimate parasite.
But with the cruciform, that great neural-networked Core computing device which is the Christian cruciformed part of the human race has found a source for almost unlimited creativity. All they need for a creativity catalyst is the death of large parts of the neural net. And humans provide that in abundance.
The Core AI’s hover like vampires, waiting to feed off the dying human brains, sucking the marrow of creativity from humankind’s mental bones. And when the deaths fall below the needed level or when their Core-computing demand for creative solutions rises… they orchestrate a few million more deaths.
Odd accidents occur. Humans’ health is not what it was a few centuries ago. Death from cancer, heart disease, and the like are on the rise. And there are more clever forms of arranged mortality. Even with the Pax imposition of peace within the human interstellar empire, the incidents of violent death are on the rise.
New forms of death are introduced. The archangel starships are such a beginning. Death is a cheap commodity for the born-again Christian. But it is a rich source of orchestrated creativity for the Core.
And thus the cruciform. And thus… I believe… at least one reason to eliminate the things from the human body and the human soul.
(when Aenea quits speaking, there is a long silence. Leaves on the treeship whisper in the breeze of circulating air. None of the hundreds of humans or hominids on the many platforms, branches, bridges, or stairways seem to blink, so intense are their gazes as they stare at my friend. Finally a single, strong voice speaks… )
Father Captain de Soya. I still wear the collar and carry the vows of a Catholic priest. Is there no hope for my Church… not the Church of the Pax, held under TechnoCore control and the conceit of greedy men and women… but the Church of Jesus Christ and the hundreds of millions who followed His word?
Aenea. Federico… Father de Soya… it is for you to answer this question. You and the faithful like you. But I can tell you that there are billions of men and women today… some who wear the cruciform, more who do not… who yearn to return to a Church which concerns itself with spiritual matters, with the teachings of Christ and the deepest matters of the heart, rather than with this obsession with false resurrection.
Templar Het Masteen. Revered One Who Teaches, if I may change the subject from the cosmic and theological to the most personal and petty…
Aenea. Nothing of which you speak could be petty, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.
Templar Het Masteen. I was on the Hyperion pilgrimage with your mother, Revered One Who Teaches…
Aenea. She spoke to me of you often, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.
Templar Het Masteen. Then you know that the Lord of Pain… the Shrike… came to me as the pilgrims were crossing Hyperion’s Sea of Grass on the windwagon, One Who Teaches. It came to me and carried me forward in time and across space… to this time, to this place.
Aenea. Yes.
Templar Het Masteen. And in my conversations with you and with my brethren in the Brotherhood of the Muir, I have come to understand that it is my fate to serve the Muir and the cause of Life in this age, as it was prophesied centuries ago by our own seers into the Void Which Binds. But in these days, and despite the best efforts of my Brothers and other kind friends among the Ousters, I have heard of Martin Silenus’s epic poem and found an edition of the Cantos…
Aenea. That is unfortunate, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. My Uncle Martin wrote that to the best of his knowledge, but his knowledge was incomplete.
Templar Het Masteen. But in the Cantos, Revered One Who Teaches, it says that the pilgrims in their day… and my friend Colonel Kassad has confirmed that this was the case… that they find me on Hyperion, in the Valley of the Time Tombs, and that I die shortly after they find me…
Aenea. This is true in the context of the Cantos, but…
Templar Het Masteen (holding up one hand to silence my friend). It is not the inevitability of my return through time to the pilgrimage on Hyperion nor my inevitable death that worries me, Revered One Who Teaches. I understand that this is just one possible future for me… however probable or desirable. But what I wish to clarify is the truth of my last words according to the old poet’s Cantos. Is it true that immediately before dying I will cry out, I am the True Chosen. I must guide the Tree of Pain during the time of Atonement.
Aenea. This is what is written in the Cantos, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.
Templar Het Masteen (smiling under his hood). And this time is near, Revered One Who Teaches? Will you be using this Yggdrasill as the Tree of Pain for our Atonement as the prophecies attest?
Aenea. I will, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. I will be leaving to carry out that Atonement within standard days. I formally ask that the Yggdrasill be the instrument of our voyage and the instrument of that Atonement. I will be inviting many among us here tonight to join me on that final voyage. And I formally ask you, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, if you will captain the treeship Yggdrasill—forever after known as the Tree of Pain—on this voyage.
Templar Het Masteen. I formally accept your invitation and agree to captain the treeship Yggdrasill on this mission of Atonement, O Revered One Who Teaches.
(there are several minutes of silence.)
Foreman Jigme Norbu. Aenea, George and I have a question.
Aenea. Yes, Jigme.
Foreman Jigme Norbu. You have taught us about the TechnoCore’s quiet genocide on such worlds as Hebron, Qom-Riyadh, and others. Well… not genocide, exactly, because the populations have been put in a sort of sleeping death, but a terrible kidnapping.
Aenea. Yes.
Foreman Jigme Norbu. Has this happened to our beloved T’ien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, since we left, Aenea? Have our friends and families been silenced with this Core deathwand and been carried away to some Labyrinthine world?
Aenea. Yes, Jigme, I am sad to say that it has happened. The bodies are being transported offworld even as we speak.
Kuku Se. Why? For what reason are these populations being kidnapped? The Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the atheists, the Marxists, and now our beautiful Buddhist world. Is the Pax intent on destroying all other faiths?
Aenea. That is the Pax and Church’s motivation, Kuku. For the TechnoCore it is a much more complicated matter. Without the cruciform parasite on these non-Christian populations, the Core cannot use these humans in its dying neural net. But by storing these billions of people in their false death, the Core can utilize their minds in its huge, parallel-processing neural network. It is a mutually beneficial deal—the Church, who carries out much of the removal work, is no longer threatened by nonbelievers—the Core, who brings the sleep death and carries out the storage in the Labyrinths, gains new circuits in its Ultimate Intelligence network.
Foreman George Tsarong. Is there no hope then? Can we do nothing to help our friends?
Ouster Navs
on Hamnim. Excuse me for interrupting, M. Tsarong, M. Aenea, but we should explain to our friends that when the time comes for our Ouster Swarms and Templar allies to take the offensive against the Pax, our first objective is to liberate the many Labyrinthine worlds where these populations are kept in silent storage and to attempt to revive them.
The Dorje Phamo (loudly). Revive them? How is this to happen? How can anyone revive them?
Aenea. By striking directly at the TechnoCore.
Lhomo Dondrub. And where is the TechnoCore, Aenea? Tell me and I will go there now and do battle with these AI cowards.
Aenea. The true location of the TechnoCore has been the AI’s best-kept secret since the entities left Old Earth a thousand standard years ago, Lhomo. Their actual, physical location has been hidden since then… their secrecy is their best defense against the hosts which might turn against their parasites.
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. CEO Meina Gladstone was convinced that the Core dwelt in the interstices of the farcaster medium… like invisible spiders in an unseen web. It is the reason she authorized the deathbombing of the space-portal farcaster network… to strike at the Core. Was she wrong? Were the farcasters destroyed for nothing?
Aenea. She was wrong, Fedmahn. The physical location of the Core was not within the farcaster medium… which is the fabric of the Void Which Binds. But the destruction of the farcasters was not in vain… it deprived the Core of the parasite medium upon which they fed on human minds, while silencing part of their megasphere data network.
Lhomo Dondrub. But, Aenea, you know where the Core resides?
Aenea. I believe I do.
Lhomo Dondrub. Will you tell us so that we can attack them with our teeth and nails and bullets and plasma weapons?
