Redemption Ark (Revelation Space, #2)

by Alastair Reynolds

We narrowed the distance to your two ships, with the unhurried lope of ancient killers who had no racial memory of failure. You sensed our minds: bleak intellects poised on the dangerous verge of intelligence, as old and cold as the dust between the stars. You sensed our hunger.

A number of the very old were still able to make their own way to their seats, but the majority were aided by servitors, exoskeletons or black clouds of thumb-sized drones. A few were so near the end of physical life that they had nearly abandoned the flesh entirely. They came in as heads, hooked up to spiderlike mobility prostheses. One or two were massively swollen brains so full of machinery that they could no longer be housed in skulls. The brains rode inside transparent fluid-filled domes dense with throbbing support machinery. They were the most extreme Conjoined, and by this stage most of their conscious activity would have devolved into the distributed web of greater Conjoiner thought. Each retained their brain like a family unwilling to demolish a crumbling mansion even though they hardly ever lived in it.

Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.

What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave.

We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]

Volyova marshalled her thoughts with the care of someone placing heavy ornaments on a rickety shelf.

The vacuum imposes inertia? [It isn’t really a vacuum, not at the quantum level. It’s a seething foam of rich interactions: a broiling sea of fluctuations, with particles and messenger-particles in constant existential flux, like glints of sunlight on ocean waves. It’s the choppiness of that sea which creates inertial mass, not matter itself. The trick is to find a way to modify the properties of the quantum vacuum - to reduce or increase the energy density of the electromagnetic zero-point flux. To calm the sea, if only in a locally defined volume.]

For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars. There were no stable niches in the galactic disc.

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.

The impact of so familiar an emotion as sadness on the flow of history had never been properly accounted for, Scorpio thought. Grief and remorse, loss and pain, sadness and sorrow were at least as powerful shapers of events as anger, greed and retribution.

‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’ ‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human sons of bitches.’ ‘And the consequences?’ ‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’ ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ ‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’

‘She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry - those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right - they’re the ones that cause the problems. People like Skade.’

beneath that calm surface layer, glimpsed like something rushing behind smoked glass, there lay a howling storm of consciousness. It was frantic and ceaseless, like a machine always on the point of ripping itself apart, but one that would never find respite in its own destruction.

Galiana didn’t agree, of course. She was always the sensual one, the one who revelled in the realm of the senses.

That was what her enemies never truly understood about her - that she honestly loved humanity more than they did. It was why she made the Conjoined. Not to be something better than humanity, but as a gift, a promise of what humanity could be if we only realised our potential.

Galiana didn’t think of love as some ancient Darwinian trick of brain chemistry that had to be eradicated from the human mind. She saw it as something that had to be brought to its culmination...

You don’t exactly go out of your way to make me feel welcome, Seventeen. [What, the enforced paralysis and the sense of creeping terror? You mean you don’t like that?] I don’t think I was ever meant to like it, Seventeen. She detected the tiniest hint of a sulk in the weapon’s reply. [Perhaps.]

I confess I laughed out loud at this!

Maybe they were never meant to be this brutal, Felka - have you considered that? That they might once have been more like shepherds and less like poachers? Perhaps that was the first failure, so long ago that no one remembers it. The wolves kept following the rules they had been instructed to enforce, but with less and less wisdom; less and less mercy. What started as gentle containment became xenocide. What started as authority became tyranny, self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. Consider it, Felka. There might be a higher cause to what they’re doing, but it doesn’t have to be right.

Machines might still stalk those cosmic steppes, and they might in some sense continue to process and interpret data, but there would be no recognition, no love, no hate, no loss, no pain, only analysis, until the last flicker of power faded from the last circuit, leaving a final stalled algorithm half-executed.

Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival.