Genes are lesser than organisms because they do not directly know of organisms at all. Only the blunt feedback of survival “tells” genes of the furious combat and subtle strategies played out on the stage of the organisms.
In a larger view, organisms are as unaware as genes.
At a critical stage of evolution, once minds appear and thrive, a new stage deploys.
Above the apparent order of the gene world, above even the drama of organisms, a higher complication plays out. This is the largest theater of all. Upon it, self-replicating ideas in the minds of machines follow the same laws of evolution. These are called kenes.
Nigel staggered. He was still here, standing beside Abraham on a grassy plain.
And he was also encased in a place where ideas flowed like amber fire around him. Concepts burned with timeless intensity, crisp and sharp and churning past. They were in a different part of his mind, a place no less immediate than the grass underfoot.
No bird here. Or was he inside the bird?
He tried to walk and his feet dragged in a molasses-dark murk. He looked down and could not see his feet.
To a kene, he realized, the territory of thought was as real and vital as a savanna, where predators and prey made their eternal dance.
Nigel said slowly, words dragging, “The clays, the ones who came first—”
—fast images of something like a muddy beehive. But no bees. Instead, crystals swarmed in the lattice walls. A slimy sheen seeped over hexagonal corners, intricate slabs. A circulatory system?
In the winking arrays order stirred, shimmered.
“—they helped make you?”
“And you earlier bio logics, of course.” The bird voice was back but Nigel could not see it. Whatever the huge voice had been before, it was speaking now through the lesser vessel of the bird. And it had only begun to unreel an argument, a history.
The bird voice said, “They clays persisted, in some sites of this galaxy. They transformed the entire crust of their worlds into integrated lattice minds.”
Nigel breathed evenly. Was he being swallowed? “So when these kenes formed—”
—sliding stacks of phosphorescence in a cold black vault without end. The realm of self-aware data. Feeding on the conceptual fodder of the mechminds. Cool and serene and still coming out of Darwin, alien, alien—
“There was an . . . affinity. The kenes united with those of lesser substrate. The clays were analog structures with digital storage. Together they conducted . . . experiments.”
Abraham asked from somewhere nearby, “It’s so smart, why’s it talk slow?”
Nigel found it surprisingly hard to speak here. “We don’t have the right words. Sentences are, well, narrow.” Like pushing an ocean through a drainpipe. With a paper cup.
The bird said hollowly, “Their/Our early synthesis gave forth the arches which frame the Galactic Center.”
Nigel remembered the colossal luminous structures, hundreds of light-years long, beautifully streaming, each a reedy light-year wide. “How did they work out?”
—gut-deep agonies, shattering conflicts, ripped strands, howling vacancies—
“Evolution is pain. We gained insight from them.”
So much for the High Church school of advanced intelligence. Abraham asked shrewdly, “That Magnetic Mind came out of it all?”
“As a devolved application. It is a useful place to dispatch beings/information no longer needed at our/its level.”
Abraham nodded, a pale shadow to Nigel’s left. “A prickly thing.”
Nigel had taken enough, for now. He needed the touch of the human. Desperately.
He studied the wrinkled old man. Taller and far younger than Nigel, in total memory store, but strangely similar. Perhaps memory was not the sole key to experience? The man had been through a lot. For the first time Nigel truly looked at Abraham and saw him as a constellation of earned seasoning, granted him the space an equal deserves. He had gotten out of the habit of doing that, he realized. He had, in his almighty manifestations, lost a certain touch. Or an uncertain one, he thought ruefully.
“Ignore all these onlookers,” he said to Abraham. “Even gods can be just backdrop, if we choose.”
Abraham grunted sour agreement. Nigel grinned. Somehow he liked this old bastard. “Tell me how it was, then?”
THREE
Hard Pursuit
You sure it didn’t pick you up?” his father asked.
“Yeasay.”
“Quath?” Killeen’s eyes swiveled to study the huge head of the many-legger. Toby never knew why he bothered to do that. Habit, maybe. The alien’s face was an array of sensors and Toby had never been able to read any expression there.
“Damn all,” Killeen said, “I didn’t ask for a lecture.”
“Confidence level?”
Killeen nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go.”
“Now?” Toby had wanted to ease back a bit.
“No point in waiting.”
Cermo muscled his way up the slope, puffing to the ledge they were all sitting on. “I get nothing from outlyin’ pickups.”
His broad face furrowed with concern but he said no more. The big man settled onto the ledge and looked out. Pale gray light seeped into distant timestone peaks. It was like a smothered dawn on a world that had curled up onto itself. Above them hung a distant landscape of tawny desert. Dried out river beds cut that land, several hundred klicks away but still visible through a cottony haze. Those river valleys looked ancient and Toby knew they could reach them with maybe a week of hard running, through esty slips and wrack-ranges. Maybe the Mantis would lead them that way. This Lane was twisted and tortured, space-time turning upon itself in knots unimaginable until experienced.
“Let’s vector for it, then,” Killeen said and stood up.
Toby felt a surge of zest as they started out and it lasted until they picked up the Mantis trail. At first he thought he was stronger than Killeen and Cermo and even got impatient with their slow tracking, sweeping the area for signifiers. Killeen halted for a rest every hour, old Bishop Family discipline, but at the very start of a pursuit it irked Toby.
—I could damn sure get ahead faster than this,—he sent to Quath on private comm.
Quath ran on internals of huge energy. She could outpace them all.—Maybe you should go on ahead.—
—What are they?— Toby was genuinely interested. The Myriapodia seemed to have abilities beyond human dreams.
—Um. That all?—
Beyond that Quath would say no more. Toby puzzled on it for a while but by then he started to tire and Killeen and Cermo were still moving at their same steady pace. They took the same short rests exactly every hour and picked up and went on. Quath herself was upping the pace too. Or so it seemed, though through his sweat-stung eyes the land was opening faster now to Toby and he plunged into it with a fresh energy born of the fatigue itself.
They came upon the first of the Mantis loci in a slope of shimmering timestone.
Cermo sighted the small shiny hexagon. “Mantis is fallin’ apart,” he said, kicking at it.
She did.
Killeen’s weathered face tightened. “Why? What’s it doing?”
Toby asked, “What’s the sense in that?”
“To lighten up,” Cermo said.
Toby tossed it in his palm. “No mass to this thing.”
“Probably just junked a whole seg. This is a frag,” Cermo said. He had tracked mechs of all descriptions an
d held them in a lofty, bruised contempt despite the fact that mechs had brought down many of his friends.
“Good sign,” Killeen said flatly and they went on.
The ground began to move under them. The worst of it was in the gut-deep confusion, nausea, and sickening lurches. Toby’s eyes did not tell him true about what his feet and body felt. He remembered Quath saying once about the timestone, The defining feature is the lack of definition—which he had thought to be a joke then.
Not now. Rock parted and pearly vapor churned from the vent. Esty purled off in gossamer sheets, dissolving as they rose. Spray ascended, enclosing him in a halo of himself, somehow caught and momentarily reflected in the event-haze, as if he were both there and also flickering into the surroundings and joining them. The other self peeled away and circled to the tops of the cliffs and became a wreath in the shearing wind, soon frayed into refractive vapor.
“Gets hard here,” was all Killeen said. They went into broken country ahead.
Maybe he should have stayed behind after spotting the Mantis. He was a Bishop grown to fullness now but for this pursuit experience was crucial and he had little. The Mantis and Killeen had fought each other ever since he could remember. Toby wanted to be here but he knew he was a drag on the others, though of course they would not speak of it.
Cermo said it with his eyes, firm and black. There was nothing to be done, the pursuit was on. This terrain was too dangerous for Toby to backtrack by himself; the Mantis was not the only high-level mech here. They had watched from a distance as navvies and grubbers mined and foraged for mech debris.
So he settled in. He went hard and long and said nothing. Around their passage seethed strange vegetations, curled rock, and clotted air, the esty’s energy expressed in frothy plenty. To Toby it seemed some moronic God kept reshaping the land beyond any probable use. The green profusion here seemed demented, undeserved. He realized only dimly that his irritation came out of his fatigue. For that there was nothing to be done and in his father’s face he saw that. He kept falling behind their long, loping stride and so was glad when they stopped suddenly. To stay on his feet as they studied something on the ground he leaned against a rock, out of fear that he was already stumble-around tired.
It was a spool of something translucent yet mica-bright.
In a hollow were dusty locomotion parts, a whole tractor assembly, footpads—all junked. Toby looked them over and saw they were modular.
Cermo and Killeen inspected the ground. They had done that all along the trail, talking to each other about the track. Toby looked at the round depressions and flattened angular prints and saw the broken twigs where the thing had passed. The twig stems were not dry yet and Cermo fingered them and looked at the radiance streaming from the timestone around there. Crushed wild grass lay squashed but not browned as it would be soon.
“It’s doin’ pretty well for broken country,” Cermo said.
Killeen frowned. “Going to be hard.”
Toby said, “If I could make it out, maybe its systems are so far down—”
“You said you didn’t see it,” Cermo said. “Just felt it.”
“Yeasay.”
Cermo shook his head slowly as he looked down at the matted grass. “If we run up on it, won’t be feelin’ our way.”
Of course he was right. The Mantis was invisible to human sensoria. It could deflect attention from itself, disperse telltales, turn a thousand techtricks. Toby scuffed at a stone and said nothing.
Quath said.
“Enough so it can’t ambush us?” Killeen eyed Quath’s shifting bulk skeptically.
“Or wants us to think so,” Killeen shot back. He smiled to take the sting out of it. Toby wondered if Quath would understand the quick flash of yellow teeth in the rugged, walnut face.
FOUR
Abraham
Nigel sat and listened. He ignored the gods who loomed like acoustic shadows all around him and Abraham. He concentrated very hard on hearing what one single human voice said and let that anchor him again in a place where he could keep his sanity. He had done this before, the memories were there, and knew that though this was a small, seemingly simple act, to fail to do so was to die. The hugeness around him, squatting in his mind like mammoths in the night, just beyond the faint human campfire, would crush him without even noticing the act.
Abraham did not talk much about what the Highers had done. They had showed him things, maybe to teach and maybe for some other reason that was never evident, and he could not describe those, either. Later, maybe. Not right away. Maybe never.
He had been held by them in a kind of mixed state. He could feel his body and the bare simple open spaces around him but that was all. He could walk or run but he never got anywhere. Dry and smooth, the plain never ended. He came to understand that it was closed but had no boundary, no wall. The plain somehow wrapped around on itself though he could feel no curvature. A pearly glow came up through the featureless plain and when that faded he slept, though of course nothing told him to.
Simple food appeared when he slept. He spent a lot of time exercising and there were always his captors to talk to just by speaking into the air. They were almost impossible to understand and he tired of their unintentional riddles. It had gone on a long time and he had adapted to it.
So he spent a lot of the time inside himself. It was surprising, he said, what you can remember when you have nothing to do but remember. He went on imaginary walks through the Citadel. He had seen it crashing down and smelled its scorched ramparts but in his mind he could saunter down the Aisle of Sighs and across the Oblong Square to the little place where crisp fried breads clouded the air with their fragrances. He could taste the snap of them and the cup of kaf he had with them. Then he would carefully walk down the Hypothetical, counting off the streets in order. When you were doing it by yourself rules were even more important. If he made a mistake he made himself go back to the beginning, silently sounding the names. Somebody would need to write a history of the Citadel someday and this was a way of keeping it through a time when Bishops did not write.
With luck, if he were ever to make it into Aspect, part of the Citadel’s chronicles would go with that shaved sliver of himself.
There were other people there, too, sometimes. He could not speak with most of them because the Hunker Down had bred new languages. Still they traded stories and in the intensity of it he came to care for Families with names like Steamer and United and Punjab, and for people he had never met made vividly real through the telling.
They made up jokes about talking to the Highers and how near unintelligible they were. For fun they made up a handy phrase book in Higher Jabber, with useful phrases like, “I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to be used and bored for your superior purposes,” and “It is exceptionally kind of you to allow me to travel in the asshole of your being.” At the time these had been hilarious.
The jokes would slide effortlessly into bitter disputes, too, over minute details. Only slowly did the humans, assembled in the misty, echoing spaces where the Highers left them, learn that low comedy and fierce arguments were crucial. Essential to the species. Without them you gave up. In the heightened reality of that place all things were disproportionate.
With talk alone, none of the elaborate pseudreal tech, they took each other on mental trips to their own Family, their native planet. They described imaginary meals, perils, vast and ornate histories. All those worlds had distant views of the Eater and all were doomed, of course. They all knew that and it gave events an extra edge.
Abraham said that his isolation from all he had known made life like a hall of mirrors. There was no hiding from himself or from the others or from the re
flections they gave of himself.
There are always other dramas going on and some were of a scale that made coming back to the human perspective hard. Reality was the lenses you came with.
Abraham shrugged a lot now. He said that there was no point in trying to know it all. It was not yours anyway.
FIVE
Confusion Squall
Toby got dazed and distracted as they kept up the pace, which seemed faster with each passing hour. His wandering, miasmic mind was his true enemy now. He kept loping, inevitably behind the others, trying to go through the fog that deadened him.
They tracked the Mantis by its footpad scrapes across rocky ground. Cermo and Killeen took turns sweeping to both sides in case it was backtracking or leaving a false trail. They kept looking back to be sure Toby was still in sight. The humiliation of it was that they had done that years ago when Toby had been a boy and now he was not.
The timestone ebbed. A gauzy light seeped up through the rough landscape. There were not days and nights evenly spaced here because the illumination came from light trapped in the space-time curvature itself. Refraction and time lags gave the radiance a hollow quality as though it had been strained through some filter and leached of its sharpness. They stopped and made camp and Toby fell asleep leaning against a boulder. He discovered this when he hit the ground and the others laughed, though of course not Quath. He made himself lay out his pad and once on it fell asleep again and only woke when his father pulled off his boots to check his feet for blisters.
“You’re yeasay,” Killeen said softly in the dim dark. Toby’s nose caught the heady scent of cold but cooked vegetables and he found a plate of them next to his head. He ate them without speaking and his father brought a spicy tea hot from the fire. It was not a flame of course but a carbo-burner, so no mech could track them from the smoke or light.
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