Blade, page 17
part #4 of Inverted Frontier Series
“What proposal?” Kona demanded in his sternest voice, speaking from his seat at one end of the second row. “What have you gotten us into?”
Silence fell. Urban scanned the audience, appearing anxious and uncomfortable. As he should be, Clemantine thought. She watched his gaze settle on someone—the Cryptologist!—who stood near one entrance to the amphitheater.
What scheme had those two concocted?
As if he’d heard her unspoken question, Urban explained, “The Inventions came to Hupo Sei to prepare a world for their Inventors. But by the time they arrived, the planet they expected to find was gone, consumed in the creation of Hupo Sei’s cordon. But the Inventions did not abandon their task. Instead, they resolved to re-create a world. One thousand seven hundred fifty years have gone by since then. Less than two millennia, out of a billion-year project. A hopeless project. We wanted to give them hope.” Speaking swiftly now, as if anticipating a rumble of objections, he announced, “So we proposed to generate a blade and use it to create a world for them, a ring-shaped world like Verilotus.”
At this, Clemantine shot to her feet. She wasn’t alone. Many rose to speak or perhaps to object.
Urban readied himself for the challenge. He lowered his chin. He narrowed his eyes in a combative expression. And he kept talking, the volume of his voice rising over scattered protests. “We know how to generate a blade. We think we’ve worked that out, and how to stabilize it, though of course we’ve never done it before. No one in our path of history has ever conceived a world-building project like this. We will learn so much from this experiment—”
“This highly speculative experiment,” Vytet interrupted, throwing Urban’s own term back at him as she stepped onto the dais. “If you really did propose this to the Inventions, Urban, then you’ve been misleading them because you don’t know how to do this. And if you did, then I would call it an existentially dangerous experiment.”
“The Inventions know it’s dangerous,” he admitted—not to Vytet, but to the ship’s company. “And they know it’s speculative. But it’s not all vapor. The Cryptologist has an understanding of the physics of a blade.”
Jolly, in the center of the front row, stood with fists clenched, facing Urban. “You can’t do this,” he declared. “You would need the Cryptologist to do it.” He looked to her, speaking to her now: “And you said you would not help. On Prakruti, you made the choice to not pursue a blade.”
“I had no reason to then, Jolly,” she answered him gently. “Now I do.”
“You’re really part of it?” he asked, aghast.
Urban spoke swiftly, urgently. “Jolly, you could change your mind too. Help us to use the silver to help the Inventions.”
Clemantine tensed, aware of the deep ties between Jolly and Urban, forged on Verilotus. Those ties had survived their conflict at Prakruti, and she feared Jolly might agree just to please or appease—especially with the Cryptologist involved.
But with an angry thrust of his hand Jolly dismissed Urban’s plea. “You can’t do this, Urban,” he insisted. “You can’t use the silver to do this, because you don’t know how to generate silver.” He gestured at the Cryptologist. “And neither does she.”
Urban raised his hands, displaying the sparkling motes that danced around his fingers. And to Clemantine’s horror, he said, “I do know how to generate silver. I’ve taught myself how.” He looked, his gaze now taking in the entire ship’s company. “Silver is the first step on the path to a blade. With silver we can re-create the Cauldron. None of you ever experienced the Cauldron. But I have. I remember its structure, its dimensions.” His eyes squeezed shut as if the memory pained him.
“You don’t want to go back there,” Jolly warned him. “You hated your time in the Cauldron, even when Lezuri wasn’t there with you.”
This drew a dark glance but no direct reply. Urban continued to address his words to the wider audience, speaking now in a softer voice. “For all that, this is a gamble, an experiment that might fail. The Inventions know we have never attempted this before and they haven’t decided yet if they’ll allow us to try. But I think they want to and I think they will—that is, unless all of you, collectively, decide against it.”
“So you’ve left us the option to renege on what’s been offered?” Vytet countered, cold fury in her eyes and in her voice. “And what then? To pass on, to abandon Hupo Sei, never visiting this unique culture of the Inventions?”
“You forget they’re synthetics,” Urban reminded her. “Don’t assume they’ll be angry. They don’t react with biological emotion.”
“But do they engage in secret schemes?” Vytet pressed. “And then demand support from those who were never allowed an opportunity to object? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? When this envoy comes, you want all of us to pretend we are part of your proposal, that we support it, that we are one in this mad, mad effort.”
“No,” Urban said. “I’m not asking anyone to pretend. I haven’t lied to the Inventions. They know this is a tentative proposal and that it will be withdrawn if a majority of the ship’s company comes out against it.” He returned his gaze to the wider audience. “But I don’t think we are the ones who should decide. The Inventions have our plan, they’ve had time to study it, they have seen the evidence of what is possible and their envoy is coming now to confirm it all. Don’t take this chance from them. Let them decide.”
Pasha rose then, from her seat at the end of the first row—close to where the Cryptologist was standing. Clemantine expected, wanted, to hear a fierce objection. Instead, Pasha turned to her shipmates and, speaking in a clear, firm voice, she said, “I’ve placed a copy of the project plan in an open file in the library. Please use these next hours to review it so you’ll be ready when the envoy comes.”
“Pasha?” Clemantine whispered, not wanting to believe her friend had been part of this conspiracy.
But Pasha confirmed it, adding, “You’ll see in the report that we’ve made detailed estimations of the potential risks—”
“Stop!” Clemantine cried out. She had heard enough to make her decision. “This is hubris! It’s hubris to think you can ‘estimate’ the risks of dabbling in technologies you did not invent and cannot fully understand. You think you know how to create a blade, but you have no idea of the unknown unknowns that could arise with such god-scale forces. Destructive forces. Blades were used to destroy worlds, to destroy habitats, to extinguish whole cultures. The risk is incalculable—to the Inventions, to ourselves. And that is without consideration for the massive degree of cultural interference such a project would represent.”
Pasha looked up at Clemantine and answered calmly, “All of this is included in the risk assessment, as you’ll see when you examine the project plan. Please do not make this decision for the Inventions. Let them choose their own future.”
“You say that because you believe they will choose to pursue this folly.”
“Yes. They’ve already made the preparations we requested—at least, it looks that way—and though they haven’t voiced their agreement yet, I think they will.”
Now Kona spoke, not angrily, but in a softly speculative voice as if thinking aloud. “An agreement we must affirm—or nullify. There is hubris in that, too.”
With just these words, Clemantine felt the argument slipping away from her. Urban’s sly smile told her he felt it too.
But then Tio rose from his seat. He looked back at her, and then forward again to Urban. And he demanded, “Is it your intention to share with the Inventions your knowledge of this new physics and to teach them what you know?”
A waiting silence fell over the gathering as Urban traded another look with the Cryptologist.
“You don’t intend to, do you?” Tio pressed. “You will risk our home for your experiment, but you will not condescend to trust us with such incredibly dangerous and destructive knowledge.”
The Cryptologist answered him. “You are correct that I would not choose to share this knowledge, but it is a moot point. Such knowledge cannot be shared with the Inventions because the silver cannot be shared with them. At least, I do not know how. The silver is accessed through coding nodules designed to interact with the structure of a human mind. The Inventions do not share that structure. Their minds are nothing like ours.”
“Then teach me,” Tio demanded.
From Urban, a soft cynical laugh. “It is beyond you, Tio Suthrom. It is beyond me. At Ezo, the Cryptologist was raised to a higher level that neither you nor I can access.”
Again, he turned his attention back to the wider gathering. “The Inventions are different from us, but they share this trait: they are curious entities, and they want to know if our world-building project will work—if it can work.”
“You want to know that too,” Clemantine interjected bitterly. “You’re not doing this for the Inventions. It’s for yourself, for your hubris. It’s because Lezuri is still haunting you, and you, unwilling to see yourself as a lesser being. That is the truth you refuse to recognize.”
He gazed at her across the crowded rows, resentment smoldering in his dark eyes. “You think you know me, but you’re wrong, my love. Lezuri is a shadow. He does not matter. But you need to remember the reason for this expedition. We came here to learn, Clemantine. To understand what happened in the Hallowed Vasties—”
“War happened! In the end, it was war, Urban, powered by missiles like yours, and by blade technology. And you want to bring that knowledge back into the world?”
It was the Cryptologist, not Urban, who stepped up to answer this. She said, “Your fear is unfounded. Neither dimensional missiles nor blades will be used again in war, because there is no one outside of Ezo capable of creating them, except possibly me. This project will test my understanding. If it succeeds, the Inventions will have a world to offer to their Inventors. If it fails, I will know my understanding is flawed. But at the end, there will still be no one else outside of Ezo capable of creating a blade—and perhaps not even me.”
“Study the project plan,” Urban said. “Discuss it. Then return here. We’ll vote on it in three hours.”
<><><>
Ashok returned to Dragon as a solitary instance, arriving mere minutes ahead of the envoy Ro Az Ra Ni.
Argo had been sent to fetch the envoy. Moments after the landing ship signaled its docking hooks secured, Ashok, along with the Dragoneers Urban, Kona, Vytet, Riffan, and Pasha, spilled from a transit bubble into a hangar.
Ashok instantly recoiled, intimidated by the scale of that place.
On its first visit to Dragon, it had ferried between Argo’s lock and the Dragoneer’s warren in the confined and comforting space of a small transit bubble. Now it found itself adrift in the hangar’s vast interior.
Vast to Ashok, anyway, though perhaps not so large from a human perspective. Regardless, its deep programming took over. The instance automatically flexed, stretched, and tapped against Riffan’s broad shoulders—an action that reversed its momentum. Riffan looked back with a surprised expression as the instance glided to the security of the hangar’s curved white wall.
The vote among the Dragoneers had gone as the Dragoneer-Urban predicted. By a sizable majority his companions had agreed to leave to the Inventions the decision of whether or not to proceed with the project. Ashok’s task now was not to persuade Ro Az Ra Ni to one path or another, but only to convey its extensive experience with the Dragoneers and to assist in interpreting the behavior of the humans so as to avoid misunderstandings on either side.
The landing ship’s lock opened. The envoy emerged.
Like all members of the Core Forum, Ro Az Ra Ni had been designed to inhabit the Forum’s vast, zero-gravity deliberation chamber. Its cohort encompassed nearly three thousand instances, most of them configured as translucent, twenty-sided icosahedrons, 5.23 millimeters in their longest dimension, each glittering with ever-changing wavelengths of harmless light. These instances were presently linked in seven tentacular chains, all of them rooted in a spherical central instance equivalent in volume to one of Ashok’s instances.
When present in the Core Forum, Ro Az Ra Ni would release segments of its chained instances to temporarily bond with other deliberators, exchanging data, analyzing positions, and sharing philosophies in a continuous dance of argument and understanding. Here, there existed only one other mind the envoy could directly analyze.
A tentacular chain reached past the Dragoneers to Ashok, who continued to cling to the hangar wall. The tip of the chain gently penetrated the gel of Ashok’s solitary instance—a probe that sought and swiftly found the port that let it access Ashok’s mind.
Not since its departure from Hupo Sei had Ashok undergone a reading. In that time, it had accumulated a large store of experience that Ro Az Ra Ni must now absorb and analyze.
To Ashok’s satisfaction, the envoy proved proficient, carrying out the reading while generating a voice that it used to greet the Dragoneers in a diplomatically appropriate way.
Chapter
28
Once on the gee deck, the envoy staggered awkwardly on two of its tentacles. The other five it coiled into small glittering spheres that it held against the larger sphere of its central instance, giving it a knobbly appearance. Its voice emanated from a speaker in that center and it asked many questions of every person it encountered, questions that spanned topics of history, biology, astronomy, and opinion.
By sharing Urban’s expanded senses, the Bio-mechanic was able to watch it, and to listen to every conversation it engaged in within the public spaces of the gee deck. “The envoy is probing, seeking for the algorithms of thought that guide the ship’s company,” he said to the Scholar. “Doubtlessly, the better to manipulate us.”
“Perhaps,” the Scholar acknowledged. “Though it may be the envoy only seeks for discrepancies between fact and myth in an effort to weigh the truth of our understanding.”
“Or to guess at the truths we will not reveal.”
The two existed without shape in a formless sublayer of the library where the Scholar could not actually perform a casual shrug. Still, he relayed the intention as he said, “The Inventions know we have not and will not—and perhaps that we cannot reveal everything we know.”
For the Bio-mechanic, this was surely true. His visit to Griffin had redefined his perception of the possible. The very definition of himself, accepted for centuries, had gone—gone hard—even as he remained himself here aboard Dragon, unchanged, unmerged, a keeper of secrets because the truth would break all trust among his fellow Apparatchiks.
He continued to observe the progress of the envoy and after a time he heard it make an unexpected request of Vytet: “May I interview those entities you refer to as the Apparatchiks?”
A peculiar request, astonishing even, given the Apparatchiks were all background characters, subservient in the saga of Dragon. It was a surprise that the envoy even knew of their existence—but never mind that. The Bio-mechanic, with his curiosity piqued and sensing a challenge, immediately messaged Vytet with his assent, while also urging his fellows to agree.
Vytet soon arranged an encounter.
Since the envoy could not visit the library and the Apparatchiks could not instantiate on the gee deck, they met in the amphitheater, where the Apparatchiks could appear—confined as usual, though now within the frameless dimension of the large display screen. This they did by turns. A majority of them anyway. Not the Pilot who disdained to share any secrets of his craft with such alien entities, and who persuaded the Astronomer similarly to decline.
The envoy stood on the dais, all seven of its tentacles unwound, slow ripples shimmering through them. No doubt it was capable of simultaneously observing both the screen and the curious Dragoneers, scattered among the amphitheater’s seats, come to listen to these conversations.
The Scholar appeared first. The envoy discussed human history with him, then the mysteries of blade and silver with the Engineer, and the complexities of mathematical representations with the Mathematician. Last came questions on the biological nature of Dragon, asked of the Bio-mechanic—who floated at the center of the screen, dressed in his usual utilitarian dark green, appearing against a background vibration of highly magnified motile tissue.
Though the Bio-mechanic had been eager for this interview, he answered the envoy only in generalities, reiterating the limited knowledge that had been made available in Ashok’s copy of the library. When the envoy asked, “What is the purpose of the luminous matter coating the hulls of every marauder ship?”, the Bio-mechanic answered only, “The luminosity serves as a form of communication.” He neither named the philosopher cells nor suggested in any way that they served as the ship’s mind. And when the envoy asked what manner of intelligence guided the behavior of a wild marauder, the Bio-mechanic told him a partial truth: “There is a pilot mind in every marauder. We eliminated that mind in our captive ships and took over its role. That is the basis of our control.”
“The basis?” the envoy pressed. “You hint at additional complexities.”
“It is not simple,” the Bio-mechanic affirmed.
A beat of silence during which the Bio-mechanic considered all that he must not say: the centuries of struggles to dominate the philosopher cells, the repeated failures to control them, their forced evolution, and the startling appearance of deep sentience—first noted by his counterpart and obvious with Griffin, more subtle with Dragon, yet just as real. He said nothing of any of it, because both he and Urban believed that if the Inventions understood the fragility of their control over the philosopher cells, this proposed visit would be quickly rejected.
