House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

To dam a star, to enclose it completely, would require the construction of a Dyson shell. Humans can shroud a star with a swarm of bodies, a Dyson cloud, but we cannot forge a sphere. Instead we approximate one by surrounding a star with thousands of ringworlds, all of similar size but with no two having exactly the same diameter. We make a discus and then start tilting, until each ringworld is encircling the star at a unique angle. The light of the star rams through the narrowing gaps as the ringworlds tighten into their final orientation. Shutters close on a fierce, deadly lantern.

Their main world was a panthalassic, a superoceanic planet smothered in water, with a thick, blue atmosphere containing photo-disassociated oxygen.

“All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.”

I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers.

The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.

We left our ships in polar orbit. Even without trying I recognised some of the others: Yellow Jester, Midnight Queen, Paper Courtesan, Steel Breeze… each ship guaranteed the survival of a specific shatterling. My heart gladdened when I saw Cyphel’s Fire Witch. I really wanted her to be amongst the living.

“Let me also introduce Roving Ambassador Ugarit-Panth of the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds, a very respected and stable mid-level supercivilisation located in the Perseus Arm.”

“Shatterling Betony is a determined man. If you took news of my refusal to him, how do you think he’d respond? Not well, I suspect. You may have principles, shatterlings, but acting collectively, you are monsters. I have seen it, from other Lines.”

“Quite the contrary. We find organic intelligences infinitely fascinating. All that slippery grey meat emulating consciousness—what is there not to be fascinated by?”

What prevented him from dying—what allowed him to keep thinking, even as the pane knifed his brain into two halves—was that the glass was permitting essential biological functions to tunnel through itself as if the divided surfaces were still contiguous.

Like all worlds, it had felt as wide as the universe when I was standing on it, but now I saw it for the little silver pebble it really was—a small round rock floating in an infinitely larger void, barriered from vacuum by the thinnest gasp of an atmosphere.

The naïveté of my question seemed to amuse him. “You make it sound so simple. The Vigilance is indestructible, Purslane: a massively distributed Dyson swarm, virtually invulnerable to outside aggression. It has persisted for more than five million years and in all likelihood it will outlive every other civilisation in this galaxy. Fortunately, the Vigilance itself didn’t appear to quite realise the significance of their find. They were too self-absorbed, too fixated on Andromeda to pay attention to such a local, parochial matter.”

I thought of the stardam Campion had stabilised near the Centaurs’ solar system. “What do you mean, it looks like one of ours? Either it is or it isn’t. There should be a clear record in the trove of when we installed it, who was involved, the client civilisation or civilisations, what kind of sun needed trapping, why it wasn’t a job for the Rebirthers or Movers.”

“I know; it could be a lot worse. We know what happened to the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds—that’s the one and only time a stardam’s ever failed on us. But that dam was smack in the middle of their empire, and they weren’t remotely ready for it.”

They’ll sterilise space for a few thousand light-years, maybe even trigger a few secondary detonations. At worst, even if we don’t warn them ahead of time, it’ll touch no more than six or seven civilisations, none of which are major players. It won’t damage the Commonality in any meaningful way. The other big-league factions, the Rebirthers, the Scapers, the Movers… they won’t be affected either. If they’re hoping to knock the hub out of the meta-civilisation, this is the wrong way to do it.”

It means some of our ringworlds are tied up shielding stars that have already turned cinder, but that’s a price worth paying.”

Because somewhere inside Silver Wings of Morning was the single-use opener, keyed to the stardam.

One distant day they might reassemble into a single human being, a person who believed herself to be Ludmilla Marcellin, but by then the original version of that individual would be long dead, and perhaps long forgotten.

Having all that precious humanity squeezed into a few hundred cubic centimetres of brain tissue inside that easily smashed box of bone you call a skull—not an arrangement I would put a great deal of faith in if my existence depended on it.”