I will stop referring to the head of the household as “the woman in blue.” For the first few hours of agony, that had been all she had been to me—other than my savior, of course—but by the afternoon of the first full day in her home, I knew that she was named Dem Ria; that her primary marriage partner was the other woman, Dem Loa; that the third member of their tripartite marriage was the much younger man, Alem Mikail Dem Alem; that the teenaged girl in the house was Ces Ambre, Alem’s daughter by a previous triune; that the pale boy with no hair—who looked to be about eight standard years old—was named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem, was the child of the current partnership—although the biological child of which woman, I never discovered—and that he was dying of cancer.
“Our village medic elder … he died last month and has not been replaced … sent Bin to our own hospital in Keroa Tambat last winter, but they could only administer radiation and chemotherapy and hope for the best,” said Dem Ria as she sat by my bedside that afternoon. Dem Loa sat nearby on another straight-backed chair. I had asked about the boy to shift the subject of conversation away from my own problems. The women’s elaborate robes glowed a deep cobalt blue even as the sunlight behind them lay as thick and red as blood on the interior adobe walls. Lace curtains cut the light and shadows into complex negative spaces. We were chatting in the intervals between the pain. My back hurt then as if someone had struck me there with a heavy club, but this was a dull ache compared to the hot agony when the stone moved. The doctor had said that the pain was a good sign—that the stone was moving when it hurt the most. And the agony did seem to be centered lower in my abdomen. But the doctor had also said that it might take months to pass the stone, if it was small enough to be passed naturally. Many stones, she said, had to be pulverized or removed surgi call. I brought my mind back to the health of the child we were discussing.
“Radiation and chemotherapy,” I repeated, mouthing the words with distaste. It was as if Dem Ria had said that the medic had prescribed leeches and drafts of mercury for the boy. The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. And what had not been lost had been made too expensive to share with the masses after the WorldWeb went away forever: the Pax Mercantilus carried goods and commodities between the stars, but the process was slow, expensive, and limited. Medicine had slipped back several centuries. My own mother had died of cancer—after refusing radiation and chemotherapy after the diagnosis at the Pax Moors Clinic.
But why cure a fatal disease when one could recover from it by dying and being resurrected by the cruciform? Even some genetically derived diseases were “cured” by the cruciform during its restructuring of the body during resurrection. And death, as the Church was constantly pointing out, was as much a sacrament as resurrection itself. It could be offered up like a prayer. The average person could now transform the pain and hopelessness of disease and death into the glory of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. As long as the average person carried a cruciform.
I cleared my throat. “Ah … Bin hasn’t … I mean …” When the boy had waved at me in the night, his loose robe had shown a pale and crossless chest.
Dem Loa shook her head. The blue cowl of her robe was made of a translucent, silklike fabric. “None of us have yet accepted the cross. But Father Clifton has been … convincing us.”
I could only nod. The pain in my back and groin was returning like an electric current through my nerves.
I should explain the different colored robes worn by the citizens of Lock Childe Lamonde on the world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Dem Ria had explained in her melodic whisper that a little over a century ago, most of the people now living along the long river had migrated here from the nearby star system Lacaille 9352. The world there, originally called Sibiatu’s Bitterness, had been recolonized by Pax religious zealots who had renamed it Inevitable Grace and begun proselytizing the in-digenie cultures that had survived the Fall. Dem Ria’s culture—a gentle, philosophical one stressing cooperation—decided to migrate again rather than convert. Twenty-seven thousand of her people had expended their fortunes and risked their lives to refit an ancient Hegira seedship and transport everyone—men, women, children, pets, livestock—in a forty-nine-year cold-sleep voyage to nearby Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, where the WorldWeb-era inhabitants had died out after the Fall.
Dem Ria’s people called themselves the Amoiete Spectrum Helix, after the epic philosophical symphony-holo-poem by Halpul Amoiete. In his poem, Amoiete had used colors of the spectrum as a metaphor for the positive human values and shown the helical juxtapositions, interactions, synergies, and collisions created by these values. The Amoiete Spectrum Helix Symphony was meant to be performed, with the symphony, the poetry, and the holoshow all representing the philosophical interplay. Dem Ria and Dem Loa explained how their culture had borrowed the color meanings from Amoiete—white for the purity of intellectual honesty and physical love; red for the passion of art, political conviction, and physical courage; blue for the introspective revelations of music, mathematics, personal therapy to help others and for the design of fabrics and textures; emerald green for resonance with nature, comfort with technology, and the preservation of threatened life-forms; ebony for the creation of human mysteries; and so forth. The triune marriages, nonviolence, and other cultural peculiarities grew partially from Amoiete’s philosophies and largely from the rich cooperative culture the Spectrum people had created on Sibiatu’s Bitterness.
“So Father Clifton is convincing you to join the Church?” I said as the pain subsided into a lull where I could think and speak once again.
“Yes,” said Dem Loa. Their tripartner, Alem Mikail Dem Alem, had come in to sit on the adobe windowsill. He listened to the conversation but rarely spoke.
“How do you feel about that?” I asked, shifting slightly to distribute the ache in my back. I had not asked for ultramorph for several hours. I was very aware of the desire to ask for it now.
Dem Ria lifted her hand in a complex motion that reminded me of Aenea’s favorite gesture. “If all of us accept the cross, little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem will be entitled to full medical care at the Pax base at Bombasino. Even if they do not cure the cancer, Bin will … return to us … after.” She lowered her gaze and hid her expressive hands in the folds of her robe.
“They won’t allow just Bin to accept the cross,” I said.
“Oh, no,” said Dem Loa. “It is always their position that the entire family must convert. We see their point. Father Clifton is very sad about that, but very hopeful that we will accept Jesus Christ’s sacraments before it is too late for Bin.”
“How does your girl—Ces Ambre—feel about becoming a born-again Christian?” I asked, realizing how personal these questions were. But I was intrigued, and the thought of the painful decision they faced took my mind off my very real but much less important pain.
“Ces Ambre loves the idea of joining the Church and becoming a full citizen of the Pax,” said Dem Loa, raising her face under the cowl of her soft blue hood. “She would then be allowed to attend the Church academy in Bombasino or Keroa Tambat, and she thinks that the girls and boys there would make much more interesting marriage prospects.”
I started to speak, stopped myself, and then spoke anyway. “But the triune marriage wouldn’t be … I mean, would the Pax allow …”
“No,” said Alem from his place by the window. He frowned and I could see the sadness behind his gray eyes. “The Church does not allow same-sex or multiple-partner marriages. Our family would be destroyed.”
I noticed the three exchange glances for a second and the love and sense of loss I saw in those looks would stay with me for years.
Dem Ria sighed. “But this is inevitable anyway. I think that Father Clifton is right … that we must do this now, for Bin, rather than wait until he dies the true death and is lost to us forever … and then join the Church. I would rather take our boy to Mass on Sunday and laugh with him in the su
nlight after, than go to the cathedral to light a candle in his memory.”
“Why is it inevitable?” I asked softly.
Dem Loa made the graceful gesture once again. “Our Spectrum Helix society depends upon all members of it … all steps and components of the Helix must be in place for the interplay to work toward human progress and moral good. More and more of the Spectrum people are abandoning their colors and joining the Pax. The center will not hold.”
Dem Ria touched my forearm as if to emphasize her next words. “The Pax has not coerced us in any way,” she said softly, her lovely dialect rising and falling like the sound of the wind through the lace curtains behind her. “We respect the fact that they reserve their medicines and their miracle of resurrection for those who join them …” She stopped.
“But it is hard,” said Dem Loa, her smooth voice suddenly ragged.
Alem Mikail Dem Alem got up from the window ledge and came over to kneel between the two women. He touched Dem Loa’s wrist with infinite gentleness. He put his arm around Dem Ria. For a moment, the three were lost to the world and me, encircled by their own love and sorrow.
And then the pain came back like a fiery lance in my back and lower groin, searing through me like a laser. I moaned despite myself.
The three separated with graceful, purposeful movements. Dem Ria went to get the next ultramorph syringe.
THE DREAM BEGAN THE SAME AS BEFORE—I WAS flying at night above the Arizona desert, looking down at Aenea and me as we drank tea and chatted in the vestibule of her shelter—but this time the talk went far beyond the memory of our real conversation that night.
“How are you a virus?” I was asking the teenager next to me. “How could anything you teach be a threat to something as large and powerful as the Pax?”
Aenea was looking out into the desert night, breathing in the fragrance of night-blooming blossoms. She did not look at me when she spoke. “Do you know the major error in Uncle Martin’s Cantos, Raul?”
“No,” I said. She had shown me several mistakes, omissions, or wrongheaded guesses in the past few years, and together we had discovered a few during our voyage to Old Earth.
“It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.”
“About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said.
“About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.”
“Why?” I said. “They were just planning to destroy it.”
The girl looked at me. “But my mother was there to record the conversation,” she said. “And the Core knew that she would tell the old poet.”
I nodded slowly. “And that he would put it as a fact in the epic poem he was writing,” I said. “But why would they want to lie about …”
“His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued.
I set my mug of tea down on stone. “Why is that a mistake?” I said. “Aren’t they our enemy?”
When the girl did not answer I held up my hand, five fingers splayed. “One, according to the Cantos, the Core was the real force behind the attack on the Hegemony that led to the Fall of the Farcasters. Not the Ousters … the Core. The Church has denied that, made the Ousters responsible. Are you saying that the Church is right and the old poet was wrong?”
“No,” said Aenea. “It was the Core that orchestrated the attack.”
“Billions dead,” I said, almost spluttering in outrage. “The Hegemony toppled. The Web destroyed. The fatline cut …”
“The TechnoCore did not cut the fatline,” she said softly.
“All right,” I said, taking a breath. “That was some mysterious entity … your Lions and Tigers and Bears, say. But it was still the Core behind the attack.”
Aenea nodded and poured more tea for herself.
I folded my thumb against my palm and touched the first finger with my other hand. “Second, did or did not the TechnoCore use the farcasters as a sort of cosmic leech to suck up human neural networks for their damned Ultimate Intelligence project? Everytime someone farcast, they were being … used … by those damned autonomous intelligences. Right or wrong?”
“Correct,” said Aenea.
“Three,” I said, folding the first finger away and tapping the next one in line, “the poem has Rachel—the pilgrim Sol Weintraub’s child who has come backward with the Time Tombs from the future—tell about a time to come when,” I shifted the tone of my voice as I quoted, “ ‘… the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit.’ Was this a mistake?”
“No,” said Aenea.
“Four,” I said, beginning to feel foolish with my little finger exercise, but angry enough to continue, “didn’t the Core admit to your father that it created him … created the John Keats cybrid of him … just as a trap for the—what did they call it?—the empathy component of the human Ultimate Intelligence that’s supposed to come into existence sometime in the future?”
“That’s what they said,” agreed Aenea, sipping her tea. She looked almost amused. This made me angrier.
“Five,” I said, folding the last finger back so that my right hand was a fist. “Wasn’t it the Core as well as the Pax—hell, the Core ordering the Pax—that tried to have you caught and killed on Hyperion, on Renaissance Vector, on God’s Grove … halfway across the spiral arm?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“And wasn’t it the Core,” I continued angrily, forgetting my fingered checklist and the fact that we were talking about the old poet’s errors, “that created that female … thing … that arranged to have poor A. Bettik’s arm sliced off on God’s Grove and would have had your head in a bag if it hadn’t been for the Shrike’s intervention.” I actually shook my fist I was so angry. “Wasn’t it the fucking Core that’s been trying to kill me as well as you, and probably will kill us if we’re ever stupid enough to go back into Pax space?”
Aenea nodded.
I was close to panting, feeling as if I had run a fifty-meter dash. “So?” I said lamely, unclenching my fist.
Aenea touched my knee. As contact with her always did, I felt a thrill of electric shock run through me. “Raul, I didn’t say that the Core hadn’t been up to no good. I simply said that Uncle Martin had made a mistake in portraying them as humanity’s enemy.”
“But if all those facts are true …” I shook my head, befuddled.
“Elements of the Core attacked the Web before the Fall,” said Aenea. “We know from my father’s visit with Ummon that the Core was not in agreement about many of its decisions.”
“But …” I began.
Aenea held her hand up, palm out. I fell silent.
“They used our neural networks for their UI project,” she said, “but there’s no evidence that it did humans any harm.”
My jaw almost dropped open at that comment. The thought of those damned AIs using human brains like neural bubbles in their fucking project made me want to throw up. “They had no right!” I began.
“Of course not,” said Aenea. “They should have asked permission. What would you have said?”
“I would have told them to go fuck themselves,” I said, realizing the absurdity of the phrase as applied to autonomous intelligences even as I uttered it.
Aenea smiled again. “And you might remember that we’ve been using their mental power for our own purposes for more than a thousand years. I don’t think that we asked permission of their ancestors when we created the first silicon AIs … or the first magnetic bubble and DNA entities, for that matter.”
I made an angry gesture. “That’s different.”
“Of course,” said Aenea. “The group of AIs called the Ultimates have created problems for humanity in the past and will in the fu
ture—including trying to kill you and me—but they’re only one part of the Core.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand, kiddo,” I said, my voice softer now. “Are you really saying that there are good AIs and bad AIs? Don’t you remember that they actually considered destroying the human race? And that they may do it yet if we get in their way? That would make them an enemy of humanity in my book.”
Aenea touched my knee again. Her dark eyes were serious. “Don’t forget, Raul, that humanity has also come close to destroying the human race. Capitalists and communists were ready to blow up Earth when that was the only planet we lived on. And for what?”
“Yeah,” I said lamely, “but …”
“And the Church is ready to destroy the Ousters even as we speak. Genocide … on a scale our race has never seen before.”
“The Church … and a lot of others … don’t consider the Ousters human beings,” I said.
“Nonsense,” snapped Aenea. “Of course they are. They evolved from common Earth-human origins, just as the AI TechnoCore did. All three races are orphans in the storm.”
“All three races …”I repeated. “Jesus Christ, Aenea, are you including the Core in your definition of humanity?”
“We created them,” she said softly. “Early on, we used human DNA to increase their computing power … their intelligence. We used to have robots. They created cybrids out of human DNA and AI personae. Right now, we have a human institution in power which gives all glory and demands all power because of its allegiance to and connection with God … the human Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps the Core has a similar situation with the Ultimates in control.”