Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  "The problem," said the older Guardsman, "is that the First Line has declared the matter closed and refuses to talk to the morphonts. At the same time they're receiving all these new visitors of their own. It's as if some other faction has gone into high gear. We know there were already some ambassadors among the First Line."

  "So you don't have any reliable information about what's going on out at the high command?"

  Airsigh laughed. "Oh, we have plenty of information! It's just hard to make sense of it. Like, take the 'emissary' or 'monster,' for instance. We've seen reports from the lone survivor of its attack, and they corroborate the First Line's story."

  "Who's this survivor?"

  "He's a cabinet minister from the same sunless country as the professor. Name's Loll."

  Leal had told Antaea all about Eustace Loll, of course, and had painted him as an untrustworthy mosquito of a man. There was no way Antaea could admit to these people that she knew anything about him. "What's his story?"

  "That the white filaments making up the morphont's body had taken over the other survivors of the crash one by one, turning them all into horrible extensions of itself. He spun quite a tale--and he ended it by warning that anybody else who went down to the plains of Aethyr was likely to meet the same fate. Convenient. Our senior people believe it."

  "Wait a minute!" Antaea looked from face to face. "There is no plan to look for other survivors?"

  "None," said Airsigh tersely. Distractedly, she tapped the papers with one fingertip. "Then the First Line sent us him." She nodded at a closed door that led to another section of the tiny house wheel.

  "Who is he?" Antaea asked.

  "Why don't you meet him," suggested Airsigh, "and then maybe you can tell us?" She made to rise, causing the two men on her left to shuffle out from behind the table to make way for her. Suddenly apprehensive, Antaea followed her to the door, where she knocked discreetly. "Come in," someone said.

  He was extraordinarily good-looking, and would have stood out in any Virgan crowd despite his attempt to wear nondescript, even slightly shabby clothing. He bowed, a little awkwardly, as Antaea entered the parlor where he'd been waiting. "I'm Holon," he said.

  "Antaea Argyre."

  "Ah, yes! The adventuress. I've heard so much about you."

  His name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. Something Leal had said ... "They tell me you're an ambassador," she said cautiously.

  He shook his head. "Not really--oh, I should explain. I was an observer sent from my people as part of an exchange with your Home Guard. When the incident at Aethyr happened, I was stranded with the Home Guard ships on the plains. I managed to return to my people, but I'm afraid the rest of that expedition was lost. --Except, I hear, for Minister Loll."

  This Holon was as charming as he was handsome, but Antaea remembered where she'd heard the name before. She nearly said, "You tried to convince the Guard to kill Leal Maspeth," before remembering that if she admitted she knew that, she'd be giving away Leal's return, the existence of another door to Aethyr--essentially everything. "How is it you survived?"

  "I walked away," he said with a shrug. "The Guardsmen and the other humans from Virga wouldn't have survived the journey. But I," he raised his perfect hands, "have augmentations that allowed me to survive until I could contact some of my people."

  "But by then the rest of the survivors were dead?" He nodded. "Killed," pressed Antaea, "by ... what?"

  Holon crossed his arms and frowned out the parlor's window. "We call them morphonts. They're creatures of Artificial Nature; they come in as many varieties as there are stars in the sky.

  "Oh," he said suddenly. "You caught me as I was eating. You don't mind if I--?"

  "By all means." She saw that a small buffet had been set up under the window.

  He noticed her interest, and smiled. "Would you care to join me?"

  Silent, she piled her plate high with cold cuts. Standing next to this foreigner, loading up on food--it was a very strange experience, but she barely noticed. She was thinking about Leal's conviction that the emissary was a friend, while at the same time, she'd insisted that it wasn't a conscious being like herself. The contradiction had been glaring the first time Antaea heard it. Over the weeks it hadn't become any less so.

  Holon frowned at the fare, which was mostly meat. "It's difficult grazing for a vegetarian here."

  "You're a vegetarian?" She watched as he picked through the food.

  "Don't get me wrong, I love meat," he added as he piled up a plate. "Back home, I eat it all the time. But then, we've got other things besides meat and vegetable matter to eat--and whatever meat I eat is vat-grown."

  She nodded, remembering the Home Guard fortress at the Gates of Virga. "I've had it. A perfect steak, every time."

  "The mere thought of eating the flesh of something that once had a brain horrifies me," he continued. "I know you Virgans are a bit more ruthless that way. I suppose you have to be. But my conscience won't allow me to harm another sentient being."

  Antaea put down her plate. "But you're happy to kill the morphonts." He shrugged. He sat at the parlor's little table, arraying his food around him.

  "Tell me more about the morphonts," she said. "They're not aware like you and me, you say. How then are they a threat to anyone? Wouldn't they just be like plants, if they have no minds?"

  "It's hardly a secret who they are or how they work--"

  "Oh, but it is. Your people never told us about them," she interjected. "I was in the Guard for many years. I even traveled outside Virga--"

  "I'm sure we told you," he said with sudden irritation. "Maybe you didn't understand us."

  "Fair enough." She held up a placating hand. "And forgive me if you've been asked this twenty times already. Indulge me--what do you believe the morphonts are?"

  "A mistake," Holon said curtly. "One that's taken over much of the universe, at the expense of conscious beings like you and me.

  "Imagine that your tools could think--even anticipate your needs. Back in the early days of our expansion into space, we humans created machines like that. At first, we had to tell them what to do. They obeyed our orders--did what we said, but not always what we wanted. They didn't understand us the way we understood each other. So some wise idiots decided to give them the capacity to understand our needs, as well as our commands. So they could anticipate what we would want, rather than having to be told."

  Antaea frowned. "And this was a mistake?"

  He snorted. "Well, it's not as if there hadn't been countless stories written by then about what would happen if you let your machines understand you that well. --Problem is, they were all wrong. They all assumed the machines would take over--remove our free choice, disobey our orders in order to give us what we needed instead of what we wanted. Ridiculous, of course. They never ceased to follow orders."

  "Then what went wrong?"

  "We'd given them the ability to perceive purpose. Many of our researchers thought that purpose--or values, intentionality--was an illusion of our human perspective. Turns out it's not; it's an emergent feature of the universe, as real as water and rock. And it's not just humans that have it."

  "Purpose ... You're talking about meaning?"

  Holon nodded. "The Moderns who built the first artificial intelligences didn't really believe our minds were a part of this universe. They were still saddled with ancient religious beliefs, but they didn't know it. They thought meaning was some kind of local human illusion, or the gift of a god. But everything that lives, wants, and to want is to give meaning to things. --To say yes, or no, even if it's just about whether some speck is food.

  "Once our machines could see that, they could no longer see the distinction between us and any other living thing. Of course, we didn't realize it at first. By the time our ancestors figured it out, some of our machines had started taking orders from nonhuman--and nonthinking--kinds of life."

  "You're saying they started working for ... what?" She la
ughed. "Trees?"

  But Holon wasn't laughing. "We recognize each other. We see the spark of life, of awareness, in one another. It's so easy for us that we never even considered that it might not be easy for an artificial intelligence. But they are not us. They cannot recognize that spark in us, the way we see each other. Other than its shape, and the fact that one can give verbal orders and the other can't, what's the real difference between a human and a tree? Or a dog. Or a lion?"

  She didn't know what those last two things were, but the implication was clear--and unbelievably strange--to Antaea. But she remembered some of the weird things she'd seen when she'd visited the realms of Artificial Nature. There had been odd machines--giant crystal spheres encapsulating little miniature ecosystems, surrounded by a retinue of guard bots and helper machines. She'd seen one plow down the center of a street, humans and virtual life-forms hopping out of its way, but none protesting or trying to stop it. She'd asked what they were at the time, but had not understood the answer. "You're saying we gave away our technology to ... nature itself?"

  Holon nodded. "Exactly. One way to put it would be to say that we accidentally created a universal interface for our entire industrial and intellectual legacy--an interface that anything that can want, can use."

  "But why not simply go back to the way it was? Make machines that only obey orders from something that looks like a human?"

  "Oh, we do. Now. But the machines that chained their own purposes to those of nonhuman life-forms proliferated; they took their own will to survive and reproduce from the species they allied with. Some became fierce beyond all human control."

  Antaea was shaking her head. Holon said, "Look at it this way, then: an artificial intelligence doesn't come with its own will to live. That's something separate from the ability to think, it has to be added on. You don't notice this until you start to build tools that can act on their own--when you stop using them directly. The greater the distance between your guiding hand and the actions of the machine, the more it has to develop its own sense of who 'you' and 'it' are. The best way to get such an autonomous machine to work for you is to design it in such a way that it thinks it is you. It studies your desires and needs the way your brain studies the needs of your body; it identifies with you entirely, and has no desires of its own. It isn't even aware of itself. But a machine that can do that can just as easily identify itself as a flower, or a crow, or any other creature. It could identify itself as a rock, I suppose, but rocks have no needs. A machine that did that would just stop. But imagine one that, for one reason or another, has no human to imprint on. It searches for things like humans--and let's say it finds a crow. Once it understands some particular crow, it comes to think of itself as the crow--and has access to the entire history of human ingenuity and industry, to aid in obtaining what that crow wants ...

  "So nature rebelled, first on Earth, then all her colonies. Except in one place, where our technology couldn't reach."

  "Virga." She thought about it. "So who are you, in this new world?"

  He looked ruefully at his plate. "We're mice in the walls. You know, all things being equal, human beings aren't that competitive--I mean, as a species. But things haven't been equal for the past hundred thousand years. We've had technology, society, and the ability to plan. Other life-forms haven't. Artificial Nature gives all those things to anything that wants them. All things are equal now."

  "Look, Argyre, there's no 'us versus them' thing happening here. They don't really exist. The morphonts are just mindless forces that have been given an industrial base. Something we made got away from us, and we're starting to get it back. The only question that's of any relevance is whether you're on your own side here, or on the side of blind forces that are against you. Your choice."

  Antaea looked down, her arms crossed, then said, "Thanks. Enjoy your meal."

  She made to leave, and he said, "Talk to me any time. I'm not just here for the food."

  * * *

  "I WISH I could tell you who to trust," she told Airsigh, "but I'm as confused as everybody."

  The Last Line captain seemed to accept this. As she flew Antaea back to her hotel, however, she said, "What about Slipstream?"

  Antaea pretended to think about the possibility. "I have ties there. I know they're deeply concerned about the same issues ... If you'd like, I can set up a meeting between some of your people and the admiralty."

  "That would be good. I'll give the address of our drop box."

  As she climbed out of Airsigh's little jet and watched it soar off into the flocking traffic of the city, Antaea knew she should be feeling a sense of triumph at how things had turned out. She'd made exactly the contact Chaison had hoped. Why, then, was she so troubled?

  And, of course, she knew why: Holon. He'd not been what she'd expected. She remembered the blank thing her sister had become after being possessed by something from outside of Virga. Holon wasn't like that.

  If anything was like the monster her sister had become, it was this emissary Leal claimed as her friend.

  Deeply disturbed, she flew to her hotel to tell Richard that she'd been successful.

  * * *

  ANOTHER COUNTRY, ANOTHER palace, and another dinner party. They had long since blurred together in Keir's mind, yet he found himself smiling tonight as he, Leal, and Venera made their way back to this city's dockyards. Their military escort saluted and left them on the inner curve of the cylindrical dock. Leal waved to the soldiers, but Venera dismissed them with a sniff and, in the microgravity, bounded in long slow steps in the direction of their ship.

  A cowled figure waited in the shadow of the yacht. Leal saw it only when Venera suddenly stopped and put her arm across Leal's chest. As Keir bumped into Leal, Venera reached for an absent sidearm; they'd been required to leave their weapons on the yacht.

  "Please, I'm a friend," said a woman's voice. The gray-cloaked shape bobbed through the dock's minuscule gravity to perch before them, and as Venera said "Who--" it threw back its hood.

  Leal recognized the face; this young woman had been at the banquet. She'd been seated at the first table to the right of the main table, which meant she was a person of high standing. Leal carefully bowed, and didn't quite have to kick Keir in the shins before he did, too. Venera held her head high--but of course, Venera bowed to no one.

  They all stood in half-shadow, but the young woman clearly thought that this wasn't discreet enough; she windmilled her arms and sailed a few feet back, into the darkness. "Please, I can't be seen here," she called softly.

  Venera glanced up at the well-lit main hatch of the yacht. "There's another way in," she said curtly. "This way." She led them under the belly of the yacht. To the left were the lights, gantries, and piled crates of the docking ring that rode at the central axle of the town wheel; to the right was a sheer drop-off, and night skies.

  Venera fished a key out of her belt, then reached up into blackness. "Keir, give me a boost," she said. He knitted his fingers together and she stepped up to push an unseen door aside. She clambered in, and a moment later let down a rope ladder.

  When they were all inside--in the yacht's cramped storage locker, as it turned out--Venera turned to the stranger and said, "You can speak freely in front of my companions. What is this about?"

  "My name is Thavia. I'm the satrap's niece." She eyed Leal and Keir suspiciously, but then found a perch on some boxes and without further hesitation said, "You are not the first to come to us with talk of an invasion from the outside universe. The viziers made a big show tonight of sending a delegation to your grand colloquy, but according to my father, our government has already committed our loyalty to a different faction."

  Venera scowled. "Who were they?"

  Thavia described two foreigners who had visited court. She had been pale-skinned, pale-haired, her lips a red slash across her beautiful face. Her name was Inshiri Ferance, and though Thavia had never heard of her, the mere mention of her was enough to make the satrap and his viziers
turn as pale as her. Thavia had always feared the viziers, who were known to be capricious and judgmental, and she had never seen them afraid. They were afraid of Inshiri.

  She offered the satrap power and new riches if he would ally with her against that upstart pirate sun, Slipstream. The Slipstreamers would arrive soon, spreading their lies, and Inshiri advised the satrap to imprison them at once. Her friends would be grateful if that were to happen. But as she spoke, she kept her head turned, ever so slightly, in the direction of the silent, bronze-skinned man who had accompanied her here. He was never introduced, but merely stood in the background with his arms crossed and watched Inshiri's performance. No one in the room, Thavia swore, had doubted who was really in charge here.

  "They made a deal," Thavia told Venera. "I wasn't party to it, but whatever it was, my parents were supremely uncomfortable with it. After they left, I was told I was being sent to some city named Fracas, as a 'special ambassador' of some sort. I don't want to go..."

  Venera stroked the scar on her chin. "Fracas? Would any of the people there recognize you?"

  "Surely not."

  Venera smiled. "In that case, I have a plan."

  * * *

  JACOBY SARTO CLOSED the door to his hotel room, and then had to lean on it heavily as a wave of pain and nausea overtook him. He looked up and down the hall, but there was no one to see his weakness. With a muted curse he walked carefully to the stairs, keeping his head high despite the almost overwhelming urge to simply lie down and curl around his maimed hand.

  She had left his hotel room half an hour before. Theirs had not been a romantic rendezvous. The least of it had been the interrogation she'd subjected him to. He'd expected that, of course; how could she know he could be trusted, since she didn't even know where he'd been and what he'd been up to since they had parted ways.

  That had been humiliating, but nothing compared with what had happened next. Inshiri still didn't trust him; she needed a guarantee of his loyalty.

  "Fool," he muttered to himself as he leaned on the doorjamb to the stairwell. As Sacrus's representative on Spyre's grand council, he'd had a legitimate claim to all of Sacrus's remaining assets after the destruction of Spyre. He could have fought Inshiri for them--should have taken it down to a contest of loyalties and cunning then, when she was vulnerable. He had all of Sacrus's foreign operations in his hand, since he'd been able to act days before any of the surviving members of the ruling families thought to try it themselves.