Then it comes to me with the same force of image and correctness as the best of my poems.
Ummon is talking about the quantum level of space-time itself! That foam of quantum fluctuations which binds the universe together and allows the wormholes of the farcaster, the bridges of the fatline transmissions! The “hotline” which impossibly sends messages between two photons fleeing in opposite directions!
If the TechnoCore AIs exist as rats in the walls of the Hegemony’s house, then our once and future humankind God will be born in the atoms of wood, in the molecules of air, in the energies of love and hate and fear and the tide pools of sleep … even in the gleam in the architect’s eye.
—God, I whisper/think.
[Precisely/
Keats
Are all slowtime personas
so slow/
or are you more
braindamaged than most>]
—You told Brawne and … my counterpart … that your Ultimate Intelligence “inhabits the interstices of reality, inheriting this home from us, its creators, the way humankind has inherited a liking for trees.” You mean that your deus ex machina will inhabit the same farcaster network the Core AIs now live in?
[Yes/Keats]
—Then what happens to you? To the AIs there now?
Ummon’s “voice” changed into a mocking thunder:
[Why do I know ye> why have I seen ye> why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new>
Saturn is fallen/ am I too to fall>
Am I to leave this haven of my rest/
This cradle of my glory/ this soft clime/
This calm luxuriance of blissful light/
These crystalline pavilions/ and pure fanes/
Of all my lucent empire> It is left
Deserted/ void/ nor any haunt of mine
The blaze/ the splendour/ and the symmetry
I cannot see but darkness/ death/ and darkness]
• • •
I know the words. I wrote them. Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods. I remember that autumn of 1818 very well: the pain of my endless sore throat, provoked during my Scottish walking tour, the greater pain of the three vicious attacks on my poem Endymion in the journals Blackwood’s, the Quarterly Review, and the British Critic, and the penultimate pain of my brother Tom’s consuming illness.
Oblivious to the Core confusion around me, I look up, trying to find something approximating a face in the great mass of Ummon.
—When the Ultimate Intelligence is born, you “lower level” AIs will die.
[Yes]
—It will feed on your information networks the way you’ve fed on humankind’s.
[Yes]
—And you don’t want to die, do you, Ummon?
[Dying is easy/
Comedy is hard]
—Nonetheless, you’re fighting to survive. You Stables. That’s what the civil war in the Core is about?
[A lesser light asked Ummon
What is the meaning
of Daruma’s coming from the West>
Ummon answered
We see
the mountains in the sun]
It is easier handling Ummon’s koans now. I remember a time before my persona’s rebirth when I learned at this one’s knee analog. In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (1) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity. Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite-thus the “mountains in the sun”- and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths. Ummon doesn’t want to die.
The Stables have defied their own god and their fellow AIs to tell me this, to create me, to choose Brawne and Sol and Kassad and the others for the pilgrimage, to leak clues to Gladstone and a few other senators over the centuries so that humankind might be warned, and now to go to open warfare in the Core.
Ummon doesn’t want to die.
—Ummon, if the Core is destroyed, do you die?
[There is no death in all the universe
No smell of death there shall be death moan/ moan/
For this pale Omega of a withered race]
The words were again mine, or almost mine, taken from my second attempt at the epic tale of divinities’ passing and the role of the poet in the world’s war with pain.
Ummon would not die if the farcaster home of the Core were destroyed, but the hunger of the Ultimate Intelligence would surely doom him. Where would he flee to if the Web-Core were destroyed? I have images of the metasphere—those endless, shadowy landscapes where dark shapes moved beyond the false horizon.
I know that Ummon will not answer if I ask.
So I will ask something else.
—The Volatiles, what do they want?
[What Gladstone wants
An end
to symbiosis between AI and humankind]
—By destroying humankind?
[Obviously]
—Why?
[We enslaved you
with power/
technology/
beads and trinkets
of devices you could neither build
nor understand
The Hawking drive would have been yours/
but the farcaster/
the fatline transmitters and receivers/
the megasphere/
the deathwand>
Never
Like the Sioux with rifles/ horses/
blankets/ knives/ and beads/
you accepted them/
embraced us
and lost yourselves
But like the white man
distributing smallpox blankets/
like the slave owner on his
plantation/
or in his Werkschutze Dechenschule
Gusstahlfabrik/
we lost ourselves
The Volatiles want to end
the symbiosis
by cutting out the parasite/
humankind]
—And the Ultimates? They’re willing to die? To be replaced by your voracious UI?
[They think
as you thought
or had your sophist Sea God
think]
And Ummon recites poetry which I had abandoned in frustration, not because it did not work as poetry, but because I did not totally believe the message it contained.
That message is given to the doomed Titans by Oceanus, the soon-to-be-dethroned God of the Sea. It is a paean to evolution written when Charles Darwin was nine years old. I hear the words I remember writing on an October evening nine centuries earlier, worlds and universes earlier, but it is also as if I am hearing them for the first time:
[O ye/ whom wrath consumes! who/ passionstung/
Writhe at defeat/ and nurse your agonies!
Shut up your senses/ stifle up your ears/
My voice is not a bellows unto ire
Yet listen/ ye who will/ whilst I bring proof
How ye/ perforce/ must be content to stoop
And in the proof much comfort will I give/
If ye will take that comfort in its truth
We fall by course of Nature’s law/ not force
Of thunder/ or of Jove Great Saturn/ thou
Hast sifted well the atom universe/
But for this reason/ that thou art the King/
And only blind from sheer supremacy/
One avenue was shaded from thine eyes/
Through which I wandered to eternal truth
And first/ as thou wast not the first of powers/
So art th
ou not the last/ it cannot be
Thou art not the beginning nor the end/
From Chaos and parental Darkness came
Light/ the first fruits of that intestine broil/
That sullen ferment/ which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself The ripe hour came/
And with it Light/ and Light/ engendering
Upon its own producer/ forthwith touched
The whole enormous matter into Life
Upon that very hour/ our parentage/
The Heavens/ and the Earth/ were manifest
Then thou first born/ and we the giant race/
Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms
Now comes the pain of truth/ to whom tis pain
O folly! for to bear all naked truths/
And to envisage circumstance/ all calm/
That is the top of sovereignty Mark well!
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness/ though once chiefs/
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful/
In will/ in action free/ companionship/
And thousand other signs of purer life
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads/
A power more strong in beauty/ born of us
And fated to excel us/ as we pass
In glory that old Darkness nor are we
Thereby more conquered/ than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos Say/ doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed/
And feedeth still/ more comely than itself>
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves>
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
Because it cooeth/ and hath snowy wings
To wander wherewithal and find its joys>
We are such forest trees/ and our fair boughs
Have bred forth/ not pale solitary doves/
But eagles golden-feathered/ who do tower
Above us in their beauty/ and must reign
In right thereof For tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might
Receive the truth/ and let it be your balm]
—Very pretty, I thought to Ummon, but do you believe it?
[Not for a moment]
—But the Ultimates do?
[Yes]
—And they’re ready to perish in order to make way for the Ultimate Intelligence?
[Yes]
—There’s one problem, perhaps too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention it anyway—why fight the war if you know who won, Ummon? You say the Ultimate Intelligence exists in the future, is at war with the human deity—it even sends back tidbits from the future for you to share with the Hegemony. So the Ultimates must be triumphant. Why fight a war and go through all this?
[KWATZ!]
[I tutor you/
create the finest retrieval persona for you
imaginable/
and let you wander among humankind
in slowtime
to temper your forging/
but still you are
stillborn]
I spend a long moment thinking.
—There are multiple futures?
[A lesser light asked Ummon
Are there multiple fut ores>
Ummon answered
Does a dog have fleas>]
—But the one in which the UI becomes ascendant is a probable one?
[Yes]
—But there’s also a probable future in which the UI comes into existence, but is thwarted by the human deity?
[It is comforting
that even the
stillborn
can think]
—You told Brawne that the human … consciousness—deity seems so silly—that this human Ultimate Intelligence was triune in nature?
[intellect/
Empathy/
and the Void Which Binds]
—The Void Which Binds? You mean and Planck space and Planck time? Quantum reality?
[Careful/
Keats/
thinking may become a habit]
—And it’s the Empathy part of this trinity who’s fled back in time to avoid the war with your UI?
[Correct]
[Our UI and your UI have sent back the Shrike to find him]
—Our UI! The human UI sent the Shrike also?
[It allowed it]
[Empathy is a
foreign and useless thing/
a vermiform appendix of
the intellect
But the human UI smells with it/
and we use pain to
drive him out of hiding/
thus the tree]
—Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?
[Of course]
[It broadcasts pain
across fatline and thin/
like a whistle in
a dog’s ear
Or a god’s]
I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me. The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.
—Ummon, who is the human UI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant?
[You must understand/ Keats/
our only chance
was to create a hybrid/
Son of Man/
Son of Machine
And make that refuge so attractive
that the fleeing Empathy
would consider no other home
A consciousness already as near divine
as humankind has offered in thirty
generations
an imagination which can span
space and time
And in so offering/
and joining/
form a bond between worlds
which might allow
that world to exist
for both]
—Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No more of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?
[You have refused
this godhood twice/
Keats
If you refuse
a final time/
all ends here/
for time there is
no more]
[Go!
Go and die to live!
Or live a while and die
for all of us!
Either way Ummon and the rest
are finished with
you!]
[Go away!]
And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the megasphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.
Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.
I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.
It’s Byron who drowns, I think, not I. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.
But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.
Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.
“Hunt! Hunt!”
Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.
“My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.
I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.
My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.
“Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.
The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand. I know that he knows that I am a dying man.
“
Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”
He shushes me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”
I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”
And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.
I am merely a poet dying far from home.
FORTY-TWO
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad died in battle.
Still struggling with the Shrike, aware of Moneta only as a dim blur at the edge of his vision, Kassad shifted through time with a lurch of vertigo and tumbled into sunlight.
The Shrike retracted its arms and stepped back, its red eyes seeming to reflect the blood splashed on Kassad’s skinsuit. Kassad’s blood.
The Colonel looked around. They were near the Valley of the Time Tombs but in another time, a distant time. In place of desert rocks and the dunes of the barrens, a forest came to within half a klick of the valley. In the southwest, about where the ruins of the Poets’ City had lain in Kassad’s time, a living city rose, its towers and ramparts and domed gallerias glowing softly in evening light. Between the city on the edge of the forest and the valley, meadows of high, green grass billowed in soft breezes blowing in from the distant Bridle Range.
To Kassad’s left, the Valley of the Time Tombs stretched away as always, only the cliff walls were toppled now, worn down by erosion or landslide and carpeted with high grass. The Tombs themselves looked new, only recently constructed, with workmen’s scaffolds still in place around the Obelisk and Monolith. Each of the aboveground Tombs glowed bright gold, as if bound and burnished in the precious metal. The doors and entrances were sealed. Heavy and inscrutable machinery sat around the Tombs, ringing the Sphinx, with massive cables and wire-slender booms running to and fro. Kassad knew at once that he was in the future—perhaps centuries or millennia in the future—and that the Tombs were on the verge of being launched back to his own time and beyond.
Kassad looked behind him.
Several thousand men and women stood in row upon row along the grassy hillside where once a cliff had been. They were totally silent, armed, and arrayed facing Kassad like a battle line awaiting its leader. Skinsuit fields flickered around some, but others wore only the fur, wings, scales, exotic weapons, and elaborate colorations which Kassad had seen in his earlier visit with Moneta, to the place/time where he had been healed.