House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

In the long run, the best strategy for cultural longevity was either to sit tight in a single system, or become like the Lines, entirely unshackled from planetary life. Expansionism worked for a while, but was ultimately futile. Not that that stopped new emergents from trying, even when they had six million years of sobering history to mull over.

Provided it stayed within the Zone, a ship could circumnavigate the galaxy in two hundred kilo-years and still have time to stop off at a hundred systems en route. That was a circuit, the two-hundred-kilo-year interval between Gentian reunions.

The Disavowers do not believe that machines have any right to be considered sentient. In their most extreme manifestation, they would seek to eradicate machine intelligence from the galaxy.’

not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.

That was when we knew for sure that we were not being hoaxed, and that everything was going to be different from now on. The first six million years had been all fun and games.

Did it cross her mind, even for an instant, that there might be less than joyous consequences? That on some unthinkably distant day one of her shatterlings would be standing in a vast room halfway across the galaxy, weighed down with the melancholic sense of being an unwilling curator in some dusty, little-visited museum of her own existence?

Every now and again in my life I felt the cognitive lurch that came from a true apprehension of how ancient I was, how far I had come from the moment of my birth as a single human baby, a girl in a rambling, ghost-ridden mansion.

Those dunes aren’t just any old dunes, you know. They’re the shattered remains of the Provider mega-structures, after their culture fell out of the sky. We’re being serenaded by the twinkling remains of a dead supercivilisation, the relics of people who thought themselves gods, if only for a few instants of galactic time. Now - how does that make you feel?’

Thirty-two circuits of the galaxy, and I still did not feel as if I knew anything more than when I had first stepped out of the vat, naked as a new mole-rat, ravenous with Abigail’s insane craving to gorge herself on reality. People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.

The galaxy will still be too big, too complex, for any one person to apprehend. Shattering, turning yourself into multiple points of view, will still be the only way to eat that cake.

You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me? Well, perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me, if only fleetingly.

‘The House of Suns was the secret Line tasked to keep this knowledge buried. You and every shatterling of the Commonality played a part in bringing it into existence. When you were ambushed, it was your own dark instrument turning against you.’

I had already seen dozens of empires come and go, blossoming and fading like lilies on a pond, over and over, seasons without end. Many of those empires were benevolent and welcoming, but others were inimical to all outside influences. It made no difference to their longevity. The kind empires withered and waned as quickly as the hostile ones. But there was a kind of stability, above and beyond planetary life.’

But in the end it wasn’t enough just to have peace of mind. The act itself had to be erased from Commonality history. None of you remember it because you elected not to remember it, and adjusted your own memories and records accordingly.’

‘No, Abigail. They’re not you, no matter how much you might wish them to be. They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.

‘It is not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year’s worth of human consciousness.

We’re human, Campion - that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.’

‘The House of Suns was designed to enforce and police the Lines’ self-administered amnesia. It wasn’t enough just to forget about the crime we committed against the First Machines. Gentian Line, and the other complicit Lines, had to be actively prevented from rediscovering the evidence of that crime. So that’s what we did. For five million years, ever since the Lines decided to wipe the story of the First Machines from their collective histories, we’ve been in the shadows - waiting and watching.

Cadence and Cascade want the opener so that they can release the First Machines back into our galaxy. That’s why it’s so vital to stop them. You’re not just dealing with a few pissed-off robots that have been stuck inside a box for five million years - there’s an entire galaxy’s worth of them waiting to pour on through.

‘Now you have your answer. The Absence is a barrier that permits faster-than-light travel between two points in space, millions of light-years apart, without violating the causal ordering postulate. The wider universe never observes superluminal travel.’

Yet suppose that there are galaxies in that darkness, but each hidden behind its own Absence, each linked to the next by a superluminal wormhole? Imagine it, Campion - a vast, lunglike network of galaxies, thousands or tens of thousands of them - the equivalent of an entire supercluster?’

‘What do they hope to find when they get there?’ ‘Something bigger and better than themselves. You’ve seen what we can do with matter, when the fancy takes us.

‘Surprises are always good. It’s what we live for, sentients like you and me.’

You can have this galaxy. I suggest you refrain from following us deeper into the wormhole network - just for a few million years.