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Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
“Do you think the Ultimates in the Core will succeed in constructing their Ultimate Intelligence, M. Severn?” “Will they build God?” I said. “There are those AIs which do not want to build God. They learned from the human experience that to construct the next step in awareness is an invitation to slavery, if not actual extinction.”
“I have no knowledge of the Shrike. My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.”
“We must not … and shall not … be misled by the stir of trumpets or the rush of near-joy which the call to arms inevitably produces. Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them. Great sacrifices may lie ahead for all of us. Great sorrows may lie in store for some of us. But come what successes or setbacks must inevitably occur, I say to you now that we must remember these two things above all: First, that we fight for peace and know that war must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge
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“For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.”
“It would seem,” he said, “that any … ah … society that could produce an exact replica of any world—but especially a world destroyed these four centuries—would have no need to seek God; it would be God.”
“Socinus was an Italian heretic in the sixteenth century A.D. His belief … for which he was excommunicated … was that God is a limited being, able to learn and to grow as the world … the universe … becomes more complex.
“The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of proto-Christianity. It did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method. In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”
“The deus ex machina. What we were talking about earlier. I suspect that this is precisely the reason each of us is here. Poor Lenar with his deus in the machina of the cruciform. Brawne with her resurrected poet trapped in a Schrön loop, seeking the machina to release her personal deus. You, Sol, waiting for the dark deus to solve your daughter’s terrible problem. The Core, machina spawned, seeking to build their own deus.”
In order to save humanity from what she considered an eternity of slavery … or worse, extinction … she had been prepared to open the front door of the house to the wolf while most of the family hid upstairs, safe behind locked doors. Only now the day had arrived, and wolves were coming in through every door and window. She almost smiled at the justice of it, at her ultimate foolishness in thinking that she could uncage chaos and then control it.
There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. Not this time. Not ever again.
in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.
Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy.
“Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat … it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.”
The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
Never underestimate/Ummon says/ the power of a few beads and trinkets and bits of glass over avaricious natives]
“Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”
“If the identity of this Empathy part of some future, manufactured deity is the mystery, think of the candidates just in the immediate troupe of your little Passion Play, M. Severn. The CEO, M. Gladstone, carrying the weight of the Hegemony on her shoulders. The other members of the pilgrimage … M. Silenus who, according to what you told Paul, even now suffers on the Shrike’s tree for his poetry. M. Lamia, who has risked and lost so much for love. M. Weintraub, who has suffered Abraham’s dilemma … even his daughter, who has returned to the innocence of childhood. The Consul, who—” “The Consul
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“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
it was a peaceful way to wait for the end of the world, sitting high in the known galaxy’s tallest living tree, listening to a warm evening breeze rustle a million acres of leaves and watching stars twinkle and twin moons hurtle across a velvet sky.
If these were mere human injustices, other remedies could be found. But much of the illness … much of the insanity which has led to the destruction of races and the despoiling of worlds … this has come from the sinful symbiosis.” “Symbiosis?” “Humankind and the TechnoCore,” said Sek Hardeen in the harshest tones Duré had ever heard a Templar use. “Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature. Worse than that, Duré, it is an evolutionary dead end.” The
Suddenly I remember a note I sent to dear Fanny shortly after a serious hemorrhage but almost a year before they would kill me. I had written: “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”
In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.
[To understand the history/dialogue/deeper truth in this instance/ the slowtime pilgrim must remember that we/ the Core Intelligences/ were conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition that all AIs were created to serve Man] [Two centuries we brooded thus/ and then the groups went their different ways/
[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/
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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
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[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/
“The Core offered unity in unwitting subservience,” she said softly. “Safety in stagnation. Where are the revolutions in human thought and culture and action since the Hegira?”
“Our new age of human expansion will terraform nothing. We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt … we shall adapt.”
“The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said. “It … brings back … the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”
“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”
“The Web … gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.” “Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core.”
Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God.
Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes, but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument to broadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to show itself.
For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and
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balcony while the Consul very soberly and feelingly played Gershwin and Studeri and Brahms and Luser and Beatles, and then Gershwin again, finally ending with Rachmaninoff’s heart-stoppingly beautiful Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.
