House of Suns

  I nodded towards the rear of the hovering flier. ‘We have our friend with us. Do you want to see him for yourself?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference what I think of him.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Your chances of achieving success are negligible. Much poorer than your chances of injury or death, which are excellent.’ Mister Jynx turned and began to strut back towards his machine. ‘Follow me, remain a safe distance behind me, and do not deviate from my flight path,’ he called over his shoulder.

  We returned to the flier.

  ‘He’s a cheerful soul. It’s so good to know he’s fully on our side, backing us all the way.’

  ‘In his shoes I’d probably feel just as put-out,’ Purslane said, climbing into one of the two forward-facing seats. ‘He’s been given a diktat from on high to do what we say. It’s no wonder he’s a little aggrieved.’

  ‘A little.’

  Mister Jynx was airborne in a few seconds. He spun the nose of his flying machine around and dashed away, swerving hard to slip between the densely packed towers of Ymir. Purslane willed the flier to follow him, the acceleration pressing me into my seat before the nullifier smoothed out the ride. The pink-hulled craft had no cockpit canopy save for two half-hemisphere cowls positioned ahead of the two leading seats. For a few instants we were blasted by the wind, until the flier snapped an aerodynamic field around itself. All of a sudden it was as still and silent as if we were in a hot-air balloon.

  ‘Maybe it’s madness after all,’ Purslane said. ‘Like throwing a broken clock into a whirlwind and hoping it’ll end up miraculously repaired.’

  ‘Except a whirlwind was never alive. We know the Spirit of the Air started out as a living intelligence. What we don’t know is how much of that intelligence is left in there.’ I twisted around to check that Hesperus was still secure in the rear compartment. ‘He was more to us than a broken clock, anyway. We’re not doing this because we’ve damaged something and we want it repaired. We’re doing this because he was our friend, and he sacrificed himself for us.’

  ‘So that gives us licence to attempt the impossible?’

  ‘It’s not impossible - just a very long shot. It’s not as if the Spirit hasn’t intervened in similar ways before.’

  ‘But not with Machine People.’

  ‘Only because they don’t come here.’

  ‘There might be a reason for that. Maybe they’re too sensible, or the Ymirians don’t let them.’

  ‘Or maybe there’s something here that scares them,’ I said. ‘A mech anised intelligence older than they are. They think we’re about as complex and subtle as a game of noughts and crosses. Maybe they see through us that easily. But how would they react to something genuinely complex, genuinely unfathomable? I think they’d feel about it the way we’d feel about spending a night in a haunted castle.’ I smiled. ‘All of a sudden I appear to be the one doing the persuading, incidentally. I seem to remember this was your idea, not mine.’

  ‘I get second thoughts occasionally.’

  ‘Well, don’t. This is the right thing, no matter what Jindabyne or Jynx has to say.’

  A Gentian flier would always be faster than an ornithopter, even with a heavy payload, and before very long we had caught up with Mister Jynx’s flying machine. Purslane could have drawn alongside, but she held us just behind the other vehicle, as we had been instructed. Within ten minutes the black fingers supporting Ymir had begun to drop away below the eastern horizon, and after twenty only the very tops of the highest structures were visible. Below us was a labyrinth of shadowed white dunes, as coiled and tangled as the human cerebellum.

  We had seen the observation tower from the Magistrate’s office, but I had not guessed its true significance until now. It was a bone-white stalk rising from the dunes, surmounted by a flat observation platform braced to the stalk by filigreed struts. Mister Jynx flew higher and we followed him, until both craft were level with the platform. It was a round dish about two hundred metres across, with a slope-sided, windowless building placed in the middle. Mister Jynx landed first, next to the building. Purslane brought the flier down and we both got out. Mister Jynx was emerging from the Ymirian flying machine.

  ‘Get him out now. Do you see that smudge on the horizon, to the left of the sun?’

  ‘The one that looks like a storm cloud, or a flock of starlings?’ Purslane asked.

  ‘That’s the Spirit of the Air. It’s nearer than I expected - it must have travelled quickly since the last monitoring update. We’d better get on with this - it will already be aware of our presence on the platform.’

  It looked very far away, like a weather system we would not have to worry about until tomorrow.

  ‘Is it coming nearer?’ Purslane asked.

  ‘It may come; it may not. But the fact that it is visible at all is an indication that it will probably choose to approach.’

  We had fixed carry-alls to Hesperus. I took hold of the U-shaped handle of the nearest one and lifted his body out of the flier, feeling the full brunt of his inertia but no sense of his weight. I pushed the huge golden mass sideways until it had cleared the flier. ‘Where would be the best place to put him?’

  ‘As far away from the shelter as possible,’ Mister Jynx said. ‘There is a small plinth near the western edge - we’ve sometimes left samples there.’

  I had not seen the plinth during our approach because it had been hidden by the shelter. Walking slowly but surely, I propelled Hesperus ahead of me single-handedly. The plinth the Ymirian had mentioned was nothing more than a raised portion of the floor, with a flattened surface. I brought Hesperus to a halt above it and then lowered the levator I was holding until I felt him crunch to a halt.

  ‘Remove the levators now,’ Mister Jynx said. ‘If you wish to make an offering to the Spirit, you should avoid any external complications.’

  ‘It’s not exactly an offering,’ Purslane said.

  ‘That’s for the Spirit to decide, not you.’

  I nodded and detached the four carry-alls, then coupled them together so that they could be pushed as a single unit.

  ‘Will that do?’ I asked, stepping back to study the thing I had left on the plinth. The fused part of Hesperus was turned away from me; I could still see his humanoid form, with that handsome and serene face staring out at me, his torso, right arm and leg free of the encasing mass. The lights were still gyring in his skull window, but I had never seen them move so dimly, or so sluggishly.

  ‘I think it’s closer,’ Purslane said, looking out at that strange dark cloud.

  ‘It is,’ Mister Jynx said. ‘If it chooses to visit, it could be on us within thirty minutes.’ He started walking at a brisk pace back to his flying machine. ‘You should leave now. You have done all you need to do.’

  ‘We’d like to stay here,’ Purslane said. She glanced quickly at me. ‘I’m going to stay, anyway.’

  ‘I cannot recommend this course of action.’

  ‘If we leave, the Spirit will assume Hesperus is an offering, like you said. But he isn’t some fatted calf we’re giving away to make the rains come. We want him to be healed. The Spirit has to understand that he means something to us.’

  ‘Staying will not accomplish that.’

  ‘But nothing else will send the same signal,’ Purslane said. ‘I’ve thought this through, Mister Jynx. If I put myself at risk, the Spirit will see that Hesperus isn’t just some piece of metal we don’t care about. He’s a person, a friend.’

  ‘You overestimate the degree to which the Spirit can be assumed to indulge in rational deduction.’

  ‘I’m willing to take that chance.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to stay, Campion.’

  ‘Nor do you.’ The truth was, I did not share Purslane’s determination. I was apprehensive, and that alien thing on the horizon was unnerving me. But I could not let her go through this alone.

  ‘We can find our own wa
y back to Ymir,’ Purslane said.

  ‘Not without a flier.’

  ‘We have one,’ she pointed out.

  ‘It can’t stay here. If the Spirit arrives it will be destroyed. It doesn’t like other machines - even very simple ones. If you are still here when the Spirit has passed, you can summon back the flier.’

  ‘And the levators?’ I asked.

  ‘Send them away as well. It would be best to dispose of any machinery you are carrying now.’

  ‘There are things in my head,’ Purslane said. ‘My ship speaks to me through them.’

  ‘It would have been wise to mention them sooner.’

  ‘I didn’t think about them.’

  ‘It can’t be helped now. You had better hope that the Spirit ignores them.’ Mister Jynx cast a wary eye at the restless, flexing shape on the horizon. ‘Provided the machines in your head remain quiet, you should be all right.’

  Purslane closed her eyes for an instant. ‘I’ve just told Silver Wings to go off-air.’

  I moved to the flier, placed the carry-alls in the rear compartment, then leaned into the pilot’s position and told it to fly away until morning. It would mean us spending a night in the shelter, but that was the least of my worries now.

  Mister Jynx paused at the side of his flying machine, his hands on the rails either side of its door. ‘You are set on this course of action? It is not too late to back out now. But once I am gone, you are on your own. There is no way off this tower, unless you count falling. Unfortunately I do not think any of your machines would be able to reach you in time.’

  ‘We’re ready,’ Purslane said.

  ‘I must admit I am curious as to the outcome. A tiny part of me wishes to remain here, to witness the spectacle at close quarters.’

  ‘Will you be watching us?’

  ‘From a distance. No recording devices have ever survived an encounter with the Spirit. There are telescopes trained on the platform, but they don’t see very much when the Spirit is present.’

  ‘You could stay,’ I said.

  ‘A larger, saner part of me has no intention of doing so.’

  The wind slapped across my face without warning. Mister Jynx smiled at my astonished reaction. ‘You felt that, didn’t you, shatterling? The micro-climate is moving in. The Spirit brings its own weather with it. I must be away now.’

  ‘Go,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll tell you all about it in the morning.’

  Something in Mister Jynx’s mood had eased. Perhaps he had accepted our explanation that we had no alternative except to help our friend. ‘I wish you luck. I consider you to be misguided, but I cannot say that you are lacking in courage.’

  With that, Jynx climbed into his craft and sped away in a flicker of mechanical wings. The flier lifted from the platform and headed in the same general direction, back to the city, where it would wait until the break of day. Purslane and I stood together and watched the two dots diminish until they were no longer distinguishable from the sky.

  The wind hardened, cutting into my eyes as if with a razor. I raised a hand to screen it, peering through the gaps in my fingers. The sun, lowering towards the western horizon, was hazed behind a smoky, undulating mass. The colour was somewhere between purple and black, and the twisting, billowing shape appeared to be made up of myriad tiny constituents. I struggled to judge the scale - there was nothing to provide a reference point. But the central mass of the Spirit, the dark beating clot at its heart where the density of aerial machines was the highest, must have been at least as wide as the observation platform. I had felt trepidation before, but it had been the optimistic trepidation of someone contemplating a hazardous but grand enterprise, like scaling a summit or creating a magnificent art form. Now that trepidation sharpened into magnificent animal fear. It was telling me to run or hide from this approaching thing, and it took every ounce of my resolve to stand my ground.

  I thought of what the trove had told me, and what I had also learned from the Ymirians. The Spirit of the Air had once been a human man, back in the twilight centuries of the Golden Hour. His name had been Abraham Valmik, or something similar, a man of immeasurable wealth and considerable longevity who nonetheless wanted more out of the universe than it had so far given him. By then, Abigail and the other Line founders had already shattered themselves into the likes of us, choosing one pathway to immortality, and had begun their knowledge-thirsty spread into an empty galaxy. Perhaps others had already embarked on the long process of change that would turn them into the curators of the Vigilance, choosing a different pathway. For Valmik, neither shattering, time-dilation nor biological transformation offered sufficient guarantees. He wished instead to make himself into a machine, so that his consciousness might be embodied in something as close to indestructible as physics allowed. Neurone by neurone, he allowed his brain to be supplanted by mechanical parts. Since the process was gradual - akin to the continuous redevelopment of a city, rather than sudden demolition and replacement - the man felt no change in his consciousness between the replacement of one neurone and the next. But that was not to say that he did not become strange to those who had known him as his mind was slowly transformed into a humming web of artificial neurones.

  When the process was done, the man discarded his old body as it was no longer useful to his needs. He could still puppet an organic nervous system when circumstances required it, but they were few and far between. He preferred to interact with the abstract realm of simulated experience, only rarely bothering to communicate with the people he had left behind in the outside world. They bored him now - their habits of thought seemed painfully predictable, as if their minds were running on tramlines. He felt different, like a fish that had flopped onto dry land and found that it could still breathe, while everyone else was still stuck in the ocean. He had nothing in common with them now.

  For centuries Valmik’s artificial mind existed in a fixed architecture, in a fixed location. There were copies of him scattered through the Golden Hour and beyond its civilised fringes, but they were only to be activated in the event of damage to or the demise of the primary mind. Over time, he had added to his complexity - integrating more and more artificial neurones into his mind, until they exceeded the number of functional cells in his original brain by a factor of many hundreds. By then he was so far from human that his only useful companions were other ascended minds. For a while, they kept pace with him, until he began to ease ahead. They were too cautious, too unwilling to cast aside the last residual traces of human brain architecture. They clung to ancient wiring, archaic, hallowed arrangements of sensory and cognitive modules. The structure of the human mind was a thing that had evolved through accident and happenstance, layering each new addition over the old. It was like the house where I had been born, with corridors and staircases that led nowhere, neglected rooms and hallways that could not be enlarged because they were hemmed in by others, plumbing that was fiendishly, unnecessarily complex, because each new installation had had to be routed around a pre-existing tangle of rusty pipes and drains. The others did not have the courage to sweep this jumbled, top-heavy heritage aside.

  He did. He was braver, bolder, less afraid of losing himself.

  He vowed to remake himself from the bottom up, reorganising his basic architecture from the very foundations of his mind. No part of his brain would be left unexamined. Knots would be straightened out; modules moved around or deleted entirely. Throughout this process, consciousness would endure. It would grow faint, as the changes reached their most radical phases, but it would never be entirely extinguished. The planning would need to be meticulous - like a surgeon groggy with his own anaesthetic, he would not be sufficiently clear-minded to intervene halfway through if something went amiss. All contingencies must be allowed for.

  As it was, nothing went wrong. He just became something weirder, larger, faster than he had been before. The old mansion was now a shining, rationally organised edifice. He was pristine and efficient. Thoughts rac
ed through him with blinding clarity. He looked back on what he had done to himself and saw that it was good. He saw also that he had left behind his old companions for ever. The process of improvement, of adjusting his architecture, continued unabated. Even if one of the others had a change of heart and decided to emulate what he had done, they would never catch up. He had become something unique, something that might not have existed since the Priors.

  But Valmik was not finished. Although he was better than he had been - incalculably so - he was still bound to one location, locked in the processing core of a single machine. That machine, once its power source, outer layers and armour were taken into account, was as large as a small asteroid. In this era, long before the trivial secrets of spacetime, momentum and inertia were unlocked, it was about as easy to move around. He had to keep himself cool by boiling comets away to steam. He had become godlike in the private realm of his own mental processes, but he was still vastly, humblingly dependent on other machines and other human beings. If that flow of comets was interrupted, he would boil in his own brilliance. It would only take a single well-aimed weapon to destroy the machine in which he lived.

  This was not good enough.

  The change that he forced upon himself took him even further from humanity, but by now being human was a land mass on a very distant horizon, one that he would not mourn when it eventually slipped out of sight. Every one of the tens of thousands of billions of neurones that constituted his mind was allowed to become an independent machine, capable of taking care of its own survival. In those early days he still needed fuel and raw materials (he had not yet learned the simple trick of tapping vacuum for those basic nourishments) but the machines were clever and agile enough to find their own resources. Remaining in contact with each other via light, he became a cloud-consciousness, occupying a much larger volume than ever before. In fact, the cloud could swell as wide as he wished. If he wanted to englobe a planet, to wrap himself around it, that was no problem. The only price he paid was a slowing in his mental processes, as the light-speed lag between his components grew from microseconds to entire fractions of a second. Since there was nothing else in the universe he was interested in talking to except himself, this was not a pressing concern. He could even smear himself across an entire solar system, and beyond.