House of Suns

  ‘Are there curators larger than you?’

  ‘Absolutely. You will not see them, though. They inhabit the largest nodes, with the most important kernels. Most of them are too large to leave now. Their heads would fill this chamber. They are beings of awesome wisdom, but they are also very slow. Nothing can be done about that, though: when synaptic signals have to cross distances of hundreds of metres, even the simplest thought may take several minutes to formulate. We find dealing with them ... taxing. But I’m sure you understand. From your perspective ... well, we’ll say no more about that, shall we?’

  I was not really surprised to be dealing with a giant, though it had taken me a moment or two to appreciate the true nature of my host. Many of the accounts in the trove spoke of the enormous size of the curators, although the details varied too widely to be of much use. When I left the Vigilance, I would add my contribution to that confusing picture. The next visitor might encounter something completely, bewilderingly different.

  ‘Do you always live in that suit?’ I asked.

  ‘Not always. We breathe fluid, not air, although you could not be expected to know that. There are spaces where we may discard our suits and still survive, but it would be much too difficult to equip all the nodes with pressure-filled chambers. Eventually, we outgrow our suits. Then we must move to one that has recently been discarded by an even older curator. I have been in this suit for more than a hundred thousand years, and I still have some room for growth. Before me this suit held many other occupants. It must look old to you, but it is constructed very robustly. Many more will wear it after I have moved on.’

  ‘My ship is considered old by the rest of my Line. But it works for me.’

  ‘That’s the important thing, shatterling.’

  ‘Would you like to inspect the contents of my trove, curator? You won’t find anything of interest in there, but as a courtesy it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘Is your trove portable? Clearly, I am much too large to fit inside your ship.’

  ‘I can bring the trove outside.’

  ‘That would be satisfactory. Emerge from your ship when you are ready. Take your time: we don’t rush things around here.’

  Half-suspecting I might need one, I had already instructed the maker to fashion me a suit. It was strange to feel myself encased by the claustrophobic, faintly masochistic contraption. Whisking is a million times easier.

  The suit did its best to make me comfortable. I slipped through Dalliance’s long-forgotten dorsal lock, inspecting the bruise-raw, weapons-scarred hull as I pushed away into the vacuum of the node’s holding chamber. Hexagonal repair platelets were already oozing from various points in Dalliance’s skin, linking together to form the lacy scaffold of a bright new epidermis. The trove was a faceted purple-black cylinder clutched in my right hand, with a gold interface collar around its midsection, where it normally plugged into the ship. It felt as if I was dragging a small neutron star around with me. The trove was brimming with data, knowledge and wisdom.

  ‘Will that suit keep you alive for a long while, shatterling?’

  ‘Long enough, I hope.’

  ‘Then tell your ship to await your return. It can take care of itself while you are absent?’

  ‘It’s already done.’

  ‘Then hold still. I will take care of you.’

  The curator’s hand moved towards me, the fingers splaying wide and then closing slowly, tenderly, around my tiny, squashable form. The suit creaked as the fingers took hold and began to drag me and the trove in the direction of the face. I had not noticed it until then, but there was a nozzle-like aperture in the ring connecting the curator’s helmet to the rest of his body. A door opened in the nozzle and I was popped inside, into a weightless chamber the size of a small cargo hold. The door sealed and briny pink fluid erupted in, boiling at first before it had squeezed the vacuum out of the room. My suit pondered the ambient chemistry. The liquid was a soup, thick with long-chain molecules.

  A second door opened and I drifted out with the tidal flow of the liquid. I paddled to recover my orientation. I was in the helmet, floating in the liquid space between the curator’s chin and the glass. The curator breathed so slowly that it was like the ebb and flow of water at a lazy shoreline. I continued my drift until I was level with the awesome gash of the mouth, stretching away to either side of me, the lips curved like sandstone carved by underground rivers.

  ‘Is this distressing for you, shatterling? You must tell me if it is distressing.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Not everyone has been as comfortable as you, in this situation.’

  ‘I don’t think you mean to hurt me. You could have done that already.’

  ‘I could mean to eat you. Have you considered that possibility?’

  ‘Now that you mention it ...’

  ‘I don’t mean to eat you - not in the sense we are both imagining. But it is necessary for me to swallow you. You’ll see why in a few moments. Be reassured that no harm shall come to you, and that your stay inside me will be temporary.’

  ‘Then I shall take your reassurance.’ The mouth widened by degrees, until there was room for me to pass between the lips. ‘Curator,’ I said, as I fell into that bottomless trench, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what guarantees do you have that I’m not going to do you harm, once I’m inside you?’

  ‘Even if you destroyed this entire node, you would barely scratch the sum total of the data in our possession, and nothing valuable would be lost.’

  ‘I might have tried.’

  ‘You have been examined more thoroughly than you probably realise. We have a good understanding of the capabilities of your ship. It has weapons, but it is not warlike. And your suit contains nothing harmful at all.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘We have looked inside you. We found only meat and bones, and a salting of harmless machines. The trove might be a bomb, of course, but that is a chance we shall take. No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.’

  I was being carried down the curator’s throat by the flow of swallowed fluid. Ahead of me, picked out in lurid pinks and mauves by the suit’s lamps, the spongy door of an epiglottis hinged shut just as I was about go through it. I was going into the stomach, not the lungs.

  I rode peristalsis all the way down, the walls of the curator’s gullet squeezing and opening to propel the sac of fluid in which I floated. Eventually the narrowing shaft deposited me in a warm, liquid-filled compartment. I guessed that I was somewhere deep in his torso, probably in the lower abdominal region, but I had no idea in which organ, or compartment of an organ, I had arrived. The curator’s internal anatomy might not bear much resemblance to that of a baseline human, even if one allowed for the differences in scale.

  The peculiarities of the curator’s digestive tract became apparent as I took in more of my surroundings. The chamber was more or less hemispherical, with the entry point near the pole of the half-sphere. The walls of the hemisphere were ribbed with stiff, glistening struts, radiating out from the door - some kind of bone or cartilage. The ribs flexed and eased on a very slow cycle, as if the curator’s balloon-sized lungs were expanding and contracting somewhere above us, behind metres of abdominal wall and pleural cavity.

  What was unusual about the chamber, what made me think it had no counterpart in my own body, was the floor - or wall - opposing the domed part. It was a sea of waving, undulating arms, like a grove of anemones. The arms were two or three times longer than me and they pulsed with hypnotic colours, flickering and strobing as they brushed against each other. Some of the arms were bent back on themselves, their tips vanishing into the luminous mass. I paddled closer and saw dark objects lodged in the gaps between the arms, pressed deep into the fleshy base in which the arms were rooted. The objects were cylinders, cubes and ovoids, and the arms that were bent over were attached to them, fixed by their sucker-like tips to the shells of the boxes or plunging into them via holes or gaps in
their casings.

  I was still carrying the trove. Without being told what to do, I gave it a shove in the direction of the waving arms and let it drift. A dozen or so arms flexed towards it, stretching to their fullest extent and puckering their tips like animals hungry for the teat. The trove fell within reach and the arms wrestled with it, squabbling over which of them should have possession.

  ‘Welcome to my gut,’ the curator said. ‘This is an interface to my nervous system. There are others inside me, but this will suffice for our purposes.’

  ‘Those other objects - they’re also troves, aren’t they?’

  ‘Troves, or things very like troves. In most cases they were donated by their owners. I will not expect the same of you, but I am still curious about the contents of your trove.’

  One of the arms fastened itself to the middle of the trove, contacting the gold interface ring. The arm shivered with colour, vibrant pulses racing from the tip to the fleshy root.

  ‘Are you reading it now?’

  ‘The process has begun, shatterling. It will take a while, but these things must be done properly. The data is not going any further than my head. I am a buffer between your trove and the rest of the Vigilance, for now. We have long been wary of data contamination.’

  While I was distracted, three of the arms had reached out and made contact with my suit. I was being hauled in slyly, as if they did not want me to realise what was happening. I flinched and jerked myself free.

  ‘May I ask some questions, curator?’

  ‘There is never any harm in asking.’

  But there was, I thought. There was potential harm in the most innocent act of data acquisition, as even the curator had acknowledged.

  ‘There’s quite a lot about the Vigilance we don’t know.’

  ‘Many of your kind have been here already. Did they not satisfy your curiosity?’

  ‘There are still some pieces missing from the picture.’

  ‘And you think you will make a difference?’

  ‘It’s my duty to try. My duty to the Line and the Commonality.’

  ‘Then far be it from me to stand in the way of your enquiries, shatterling.’

  I felt as if I was standing tiptoe on the edge of something treacherous. I had done well so far, if only because I was still breathing. I had been allowed entry into the swarm, into one of the swarm’s processing nodes, and I had been given an audience with a curator. Very few envoys had got this far - at least not the ones who ever reported back.

  ‘We’ve long understood that the Vigilance gathers information from across the galaxy, from the entirety of the meta-civilisation. On the face of it, this process looks omnivorous - you don’t appear to favour one line of investigation over another.’

  ‘Such an impression would be understandable.’

  ‘But on deeper inspection, we’ve found hints of structured enquiry. Those travellers who have made it in and out of the Vigilance, both intact and insane, have found certain data sets prized over others. You value certain forms of information more than others, at least when your transactions are examined over deep time, across countless examples.’

  ‘And the nature of this bias?’

  ‘Andromeda,’ I said. ‘Specifically, the Absence. Taking the long view, the Vigilance can be seen as having a single, all-consuming purpose - even though that purpose is sometimes obscure. You’re organised to gather every known snippet of data concerning the disappearance of the Andromeda galaxy and anything connected with that event.’

  ‘Many civilisations are fixated on the Absence. It would be difficult for a galactic society not to be.’

  I dared to shake my head, though I had no idea if the gesture was visible. ‘Everyone thinks about the Absence, that’s true. Everyone worries about what it means. But even the Commonality hasn’t gone much further than that. A few observations, a few theories, but that’s it. Mostly, we’ve learned just to get on with life. That might seem blinkered, short-sighted, a kind of denial, even, but what else can we do? Whatever’s happened to Andromeda, it’s bigger than anything in our experience. Even if we understood what had happened, we couldn’t begin to do anything to stop it happening here. It’s symptomatic of something so far beyond our conception it might as well be an act of God.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what it is.’

  ‘God snatches a galaxy out of existence, as a warning against human hubris?’

  ‘Even if it is the work of God - a hypothesis our data does very little to support—it would be inaccurate to describe the Absence in those terms. Andromeda may not be visible any more, but there is still something there. There are even some stars left over, caught outside the Absence when it formed. In truth, it would be better to call it the Occlusion.’

  ‘The name’s stuck, I’m afraid.’ But I thought on what the curator had said and reminded myself that he was correct. The Commonality’s own observations concurred: Andromeda had not so much gone as been blacked out. Just as the Vigilance’s Dyson swarm blocked out the light of the Milky Way, so Andromeda continued to mask the glow of the rest of the universe, all the way back to the fierce simmer of the cosmic microwave background. But the thing that was sitting where Andromeda used to be was not precisely a galaxy, either. It was more like a squat, black toad, a fat blob of darkness with the razor-sharp edge of an event horizon. But it was not a black hole. As the curator had mentioned, there were stars and globular clusters still circling beyond the fringe of the blob, and their orbits were not what one would have expected if they were travelling so close to a black hole’s surface, where frame-dragging would have played a role. Those outlying bodies moved as if nothing had changed; as if Andromeda was still there.

  No one had an inkling as to what that black toad really signified. But one thing was clear, ominously so: Andromeda was a galaxy much like our own. Life could have arisen there, as it had in the Milky Way. It was even possible that life had still been going on there until the moment of the Absence. The fear was that what had happened to Andromeda might happen to us, if we were not careful.

  ‘Some of us think it’s a protective measure,’ I said. ‘It’s the And romedans building a wall around themselves, to keep us out. They’ve watched us spread through our own galaxy and they don’t like what they see.’

  ‘A wall is also a prison. Would that not be somewhat self-defeating?’

  ‘It’s only a theory. I don’t doubt that the Vigilance has better ones.’

  ‘Oh, we do. Many, many of them. How could a wall have been constructed so quickly? It would have required synchronised activity on a galactic scale, beyond anything we can conceive of. How could we possibly be a threat to any civilisation capable of that degree of coordination?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it the Absence that interests you most, shatterling? Is that why you came here?’

  ‘I came here to bring the blessings and goodwill of Gentian Line. Anything else is a bonus.’

  When the curator spoke again, there was a warning note in his voice. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  Sweat dappled my brow. ‘I’m interested in the Absence, but only as a key to finding out more about you. Like I said, the Commonality prefers not to dwell on the Absence - there’s no great hunger for new data, new theories, amongst the Lines. They don’t want to think about it too much - it’s like worrying about death, when you can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Why are we so fascinating?’

  ‘Because you’re old, I suppose. In the Lines we speak of “turnover”. We look down on galactic society and see civilisations cresting and falling like waves. We’ve grown used to the idea of being the only permanent fixture around here. Then we started paying attention to the Vigilance, and realised that wasn’t the case.’

  ‘We’ve been around a long time. It’s not as if you’ve only just noticed our existence.’

  ‘No, but for circuits we had you down as an anomalous curiosity, nothing more. We were wrong, obv
iously. The Vigilance isn’t just a stellar culture that has beaten the odds of extinction. Everything about you points to a society that knew it was going to be around for ever and ever, and was going to do all in its power to make that happen. I’ve seen other Dyson swarms, but nothing approaching the single-minded efficiency of this one. You’ve been ruthless. You haven’t left a pebble unchanged. And you, the curators - you’re part of it as well. You’ve been prepared to alter yourselves beyond all recognition, to take massive steps away from the baseline humans you used to be.’

  ‘You’ve seen stranger things than me.’

  ‘I’ve seen things that ended up strange, like the Rimrunners. But they got that way as a consequence of near-random changes across millions of years. They didn’t have a plan. I think you knew exactly how you were going to end up from the moment you started. You were going to become huge, slow giants, and you were never going to stop growing. And that’s interesting to me, because it implies that the purpose of the Vigilance was set in stone long before the Absence happened. It caught everyone else unawares, but—unless I’m wrong - you were waiting for it.’

  ‘We were as startled by the Absence as anyone. Nothing in our observations had anticipated it.’

  ‘You were looking at Andromeda, though. You may not have been expecting the Absence, but you had a reason to keep your eyes on that galaxy.’

  ‘It is our nearest neighbour of any size, therefore bound to merit attention.’

  ‘There are other galaxies in the local group, some of which could be considered potentially viable for life. You showed some interest in those, but Andromeda has always been your main focus.’

  ‘Then that is indeed a puzzle, shatterling.’

  ‘We think that you found evidence of Prior activity - stellar engineering, Dyson englobements, that kind of thing. They weren’t sending us intentional signals, but they were still giving away their existence. We would have been spacefaring for two and a half million years before they even knew we existed, so it’s entirely possible that they used to think they had the Local Group to themselves. They’d have arrived too late on the scene to witness the activities of the Milky Way Priors, or else they were assumed safely extinct. Either way, our emergence must have been a cause for concern. The Commonality thinks that the Vigilance was instigated to monitor Andromeda, to keep tabs on the Andromeda Priors and determine whether they were a threat or a blessing. If it took millions of years to make that decision, so be it. You can’t gauge the success of a galaxy-wide civilisation on a timescale much less than that. It could be that you were tasked to gather data over five or six million years, and then decide a course of action - up to and including a pre-emptive strike, an opening salvo in an intergalactic macro-war.’ I smiled, more to calm myself than reassure the curator. ‘Am I hot or cold, curator?’