—Yeasay, we play fast and loose with language.— He felt a sudden rush of affection for the lumbering assembly of legs and carapace beside him. —To avoid saying what we really mean, right?—
<You are artful dancers on words.>
—Lots of things, words don’t get at.—
<At times, that is best. Such as now.>
Toby sighed, not from fatigue. —Still wish I knew why the Mantis did that with Cermo.—
<It was not from our kingdom of intelligence. We cannot know why.>
—Something like this . . .—
<You can see it as a gift or a curse.>
—Or neither one.—
<You are two-handed, two-legged. Your minds favor dichotomies.>
—Not always.—
Toby said again to his father, his voice raspy, “He is.”
“I s’pose,” Killeen said. He squinted at his son and looked puzzled and took a drink.
They sat on little camp stools near the arch of fine struts and Toby had a drink then too, not wanting it but knowing that the moment needed it. He and Killeen drank from trail cups brought by a woman and her husband who had lost two children to the Mantis a long time ago. They wanted to talk to the brave ones and maybe to the heroic Quath, only Quath was not around anywhere. Toby drank carefully to hold on to the moments that were softening in him already, dropping away down the funnel of time and memory. He hoped he would not remember any of this last part of it and thought of the parabolic antenna instead and the silly way it had spun so fast and to his surprise saw it now with new deep eyes.
PART EIGHT
The Syntony
In SilicoMemes can propagate between computers as easily as between Natural, organic brains. The computer virus was the first, primitive form of this. Higher manifestations followed.Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.The organized constellations of information in computers were kenes—from ken, to know.Computers are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.Kenes evolved faster than memes. Soon, they learned to leave even the substrate of silicon. Ordered, replicating data propagated beyond its in silico origins. Rather than matter, it sought out fields—electric, magnetic, even gravitational. There vast challenges arose, were met, bested. Whole styles of thought found expression, bloomed, died. Free of the grinding embrace of matter, filigrees of thought played into intricate dances, with ideas as the mere substrate for abstractions of ever higher order. Even heaven can pall. In time, a fraction of the kenes became concerned with the raw rub of the worlds they had left behind. They decided to play there, as well.This intervention into the storm of mass and motion precipitated the further uniting of magnetic intelligences, mechanical forms, and Naturals. These now constitute the Highers.
ONE
Unintentional Jokes
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own . . . Nigel Walmsley tried to recall people he had known from the Chandelier days, Earthers of consummate skill and obliging manners. They were elsewhere in the esty, he supposed, or else dead. Probably dead. They had gotten into struggles with mechanicals on higher levels, and that had proved fatal.
Still, he often liked to bask in his memories. There were so many of them. And he had been augmented so many different times and ways, into the bargain. His memories had a sharpness and resonance he was sure the old, utterly Natural Walmsley could not imagine.
Living in your memories . . . it could be seductive.
But the Highers kept interrupting him.
The bird said, “If you could meet a mechanical intelligence, encased in a body like your own, what would you do?”
Nigel said, “I imagine I’d give him a smile that’s all gums.”
“I see. Antagonism.”
“Something to do with linking memory close to our hormone control, no doubt.”
“In part. You would not make love to it? Him? Her?”
“Matter of taste, really.”
Nigel wondered what it was driving at. The tension, yes—to win sway over that world he had backed away from it, and felt forever that chasm. Yet having two hands did not mean you had to subscribe to every passing dichotomy. He reentered that world and felt how much he had longed for it—
—bleak and flat, this Lane was now scoured by mech deaths and their last longing rampages of self-slaughter. So for a sheared instant he merged with it, glad of the smack and trudge of movement. Little registered, only the esty, single and woven and triumphant—
As strange a place as any being had ever lived. Humans did not understand it, of course. But then, for all but a tiny sliver of their species’ time, they had not understood their own planet.
Then the Mantis was there. Solemn, heavy.
The retina of the vertebrate eye appears to be “installed” backward. At the back of the retina lie the light-sensitive cells, so that light must pass through intervening circuitry, getting weakened. A long series of mutations could eventually switch the light-receiving cells to the front, and this would be of some small help. But the cost in rearranging would be paid by the intermediate stages, which would function more poorly than the original design. So these halfway steps would be selected out by evolutionary pressure. The rival, patched-up job works fairly well, and nature stops there. So these dreaming vertebrates are makeshift constructions, built by random time without foresight. There is a strange beauty in that.
“You’re dead, aren’t you?”
I am a part of something but I do not know what it is.
“I wonder if that’s something like being human?”
Being so small?
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”
I . . . somehow know . . . that I am all that remains.
