“Great works, at first. The Earthers are better than us, y’know.”
<But the mechanicals, tapping the energies of the magnetics—>
“Hammered us. That’s when we ordered the Chandeliers to send down whole legions. Families named for baseball teams and soccer and chess pieces and card games and God knows what.”
<Your method was Natural. A few would survive, thrive, resist the mechs—their machines, their memes, everything.>
Nigel nodded to himself. The decision was ancient, yet still it burned within him. He had brought enormous suffering upon untold millions. And finally, the Hunker Downs had yielded up the Bishops. Tough and hard and implacable: Killeen. Able to shrug off the addictive superstitions that beset all humans in groups, the mob mind that led finally to predictable behavior, and then oblivion.
They had resisted myriad minor pleasures, errant ideas, sublime softenings. Avoided the aimless abstractions of virtual spaces, of passive entertainments and live-for-the-moment hedonism. It was so easy to be distracted to death. The mechs had played upon that.
He had heard about the Bishops’ dealings with a lunatic named His Supremacy, during their voyage, and it fit perfectly: the madman proved to be mech-controlled, playing upon the vulnerabilities of the chimp mob. So the Bishops resisted, and won.
And the Bishops carried the Way of Three. It could not be a coincidence.
<It is not. The ancient ones were wise in a genetic sense we have not yet comprehended.>
Nigel jerked, startled. “You can read what I’m thinking?”
<You and I are composites. Across the abyss between species there is some . . . leakage.>
Nigel smiled. Leakage. In some ways he was closer now to this enormous metal insect than to the primates happily spinning tales.
“Do they know that this is just a temporary victory?”
<Some will guess. A few mechanicals shall prove immune to the pleasure plagues—that, too, is a consequence of natural selection. So they shall return.>
“I saw them, up ahead in time. So I suppose I knew all along. There will always be a struggle, no final equilibrium.”
<If the Syntony is a wedding of all forms, then the mechanicals must have a place in it.>
“Thousands of Families carried the Way of Three. Bishops were ornery, willful—and so they survived. I admire the bastards. Still . . .”
A mere few steps away, fires crackled and people bubbled over with joy. But they were steps he would never take.
FIVE
The Thermodynamics of Intelligence
Nigel thought of them as The Phylum Beyond Knowing. They spoke to him as he sat there.
Quath and Bishops around him, chimpanzee chatter, aromas of trees and calm green fields—all gone.
Only the voice. One rolling articulation, threaded with chords. But without words.Information is order. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, order is a form of invested energy. When a capacitor stores electrical energy within a dielectric, the dipolar atoms within it align, accumulating harmony. Discharge the two capacitor plates, and the dipoles relax, their regularities dissolving, sparking forth into currents.Information is order is food.While memes swim in the warm bath of cultures—both Natural or mechanical/electronic—others could operate as pure predators. These use the energy equivalence of information. They can swallow data banks, or whole mentalities—not to harvest their memes, but to suck from them their energy stores. When a lion eats a lamb, it is not using the lamb’s genetic information, except in the crudest sense. Predators do not propagate memes; they feed upon them. So there arose in mental systems the datavore.Like a virus, it exists to propagate. But evolution teaches that such highly selective, ordered, demanding activity inevitably selects for those predators better at it. Time favors those which have a fresh kind of intelligence, unseen in the mental world until the stores of energy and order arose—the data, the memes—to support the datavore.The distilled intelligence of datavores is a category which the underlying food sources, of memes and the intelligences which support them, cannot know. Thus they rise above the categories of intelligence which have existed before, and are unknowable to them.Yet they are the mere base of the Highers. Above this boundary of the knowable towers a realm beyond investigation, exceeding the grasp of serial sentences to describe.All forms—mechanical or organic/Natural, or clay/substrate—come together in this realm. They resonate. This forms the Syntony, a place in conceptual space where form and function uncouple. This is what communicates down to you, through the Kingdoms and Phyla you can fathom, and through many you cannot. Know this: All matters known to you further the affairs of the lesser levels, to our wishes.We do not negotiate. We do not dictate.We cause to happen. You, Walmsley, we have caused. These events now resolve the persistent pain caused by competition between yourselves, the Naturals, and the mechanicals. You have yet to recognize the clays, for they lie beyond your ken. Be warned that this is a dynamic equilibrium, not a stasis. Conflict will return. It must. But for now, rest. You may be used again.
SIX
Living in the Substrate
I’d be perfectly happy to just lie here.” Nikka smiled. “To just hold each other.”
“You’ve confused me with someone else.” Nigel felt comfortable, too, but something in him wasn’t ready to settle in. To dissolve into the moment, skating, skating . . .
“You don’t have to perform, you know.”
“I don’t think of it as a performance.”
“I’m competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I’m adept.”
“I know. My memory is not completely gone, you’ll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.”
“Just feel your way along? I can help with that.”
“So I see.” The warmth never waned for him. “Um. Such an earth mother you are.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Well, at least you can’t talk.”
“Mmmm.”
“Talk later.”
“Mmmm.”
“Later, yes, much better. There, right.”
After some time he said, “Did you think, to help me work on other ideas, modes, whatever—I would take a vow of chastity, become a monk?”
