They had done nothing but ride and sleep for the past several days. At first it was an aimless run into the desert under the wheeling stars, then the cold white daylight of early winter. Galas rode sidesaddle, hugging herself and shivering. When the horses had to stop from exhaustion, they stood them together, nose to tail, and huddled together for a brief sleep.
Galas’ mumbled descriptions and Armiger’s observation of the evidence of the recent passage of an army allowed them to find the ruin of one of her experimental towns just before sunset on the second day. By that time Megan was cradling the queen in her arms as they rode, and the horses were weak and plodding slowly.
The razed town was surrounded by the burnt remnants of wheat fields, and a cracked spring spouted dark, iron-flavoured water in the town square. The houses had been burnt down, all save one that was only half-gutted. There were whitened skeletons everywhere, some lying next to the weapons they had used in a futile effort to save their families. Galas awoke enough to weep when she saw the devastation.
Armiger let the horses drink and refilled their water bags, then turned the animals loose among the straggling, greying wheat stalks. He made camp in the half-ruined house, lit a fire and shuttered the windows. They had no food, but at least it was warm here. There was even some bedding that had survived, and Megan bundled the queen under it near the fire.
She and Armiger sat together, arms around one another, and said nothing as the sun set. Gradually the chill in their bones receded, and after a log in the fire popped loudly, jerking them both awake and making them laugh, Megan said, “I did not believe we would survive.”
Armiger was surprised, and a bit offended. “You were with me.”
“I know. But how could you stop me from taking an arrow when you weren’t there?”
He didn’t answer for a while. “I’m sorry I brought you into that place,” he said at last.
“I’m not sorry you did. I’m glad you cared enough for me to want me by your side.” He hugged her closer, but said nothing. “Sometimes you’re like a whole world unto yourself,” Megan whispered. “And sometimes you’re just a man. If you do this thing to the Winds… conquer them, or heal them… which are you going to be after that?”
“More world,” someone whispered.
It was Queen Galas. Her eyes glittered in the firelight. “More world than man,” she said.
The queen levered herself onto her elbows. Her hair was a black tangle, and her eyes had deep hollows under them. She smiled weakly at Megan. “But speaking as one who has been in that position, he’s going to be very lonely if he doesn’t have someone by his side.”
Megan ducked her head. This queen always made her feel awkward.
“How are you feeling?” Armiger asked Galas. “Can you ride tomorrow?”
“If I have to.” She fell back and stared at the ceiling. “But why should we?”
“You may not wish to survive, but I do,” said Megan. She stood, one hand on her lower back. “There must be something to eat in this forsaken place.” She bundled her shawl around her shoulders, and left the house.
“Fine. You eat. You survive,” said Galas. She closed her eyes. “Leave me here tomorrow.”
“No,” said Armiger. “We have much to do.”
“What?” She sat up. “What is there left to do? I’ve lost everything! My home, my people, my honour, my crown! Men and women have died by the thousands to bring me to this. They died for no reason. And now the jackals have the kingdom. They’re all quislings for the Winds, and they’ll sacrifice their own babies rather than defy them.”
“I intend to tame the Winds,” he said. “I need your help.”
“You are insane! I was a fool to believe the things you told me. You are the very swindler I thought you to be.” She rolled herself into the bedding, turning away from him. After a few moments he heard her weeping.
Armiger rose, and went outside to see to the horses.
The clouds had swept away again, and it was cold again. He stood for a moment looking up; no telltale moving stars betrayed the presence of starships in orbit. Ventus remained miraculously untouched by the march of Archipelagic civilization. He could only hope it would remain ignored long enough for the metamorphosis he now knew he must perform.
Megan was crouched in the street, digging up a skeleton. “I think we can salvage some of these clothes,” she said. “A piece here and there. Many of the women were… well, their clothes were removed before they died.”
“See what you can find.” He moved past her.
Megan touched his arm. “Where are we going?” she asked. “Or don’t you know?”
He nodded. “The Titans’ Gates. It’s by the ocean.”
“I know. I’ve heard of it.” Satisfied, she returned to her task.
He brought the horses into the house. The animals huffed and shook themselves, and blinked down at Galas when the queen sat up to stare at them. She shot an inquiring look at Armiger; he shrugged. At least they would be warm here tonight.
One of the horses pissed unselfconsciously, filling the room with the reek of urine. Galas groaned in disgust.
Good, thought Armiger. At least she was distracted from her larger misery.
He and Megan bustled about, and eventually Galas was sitting up, blankets off, watching them. It didn’t seem to occur to her that she might help. Armiger inventoried their gear, and fixed some straps that had broken on the horse’s tackle. Megan had found some withered carrots and other unidentifiable roots, and had stripped several hands-full of wheat. These still had their husks, so she spent a while hammering them into dust with a brick, then poured the resultant grit into a pot she’d found, along with the roots and some water. The husks floated, and she skimmed them off carefully.
Galas spoke for the first time in nearly an hour: “We’re actually going to eat that?”
“Yes.” Satisfied that the pot was at the right height over the fire, Megan left the house and returned with a pile of stiff, mottled clothing.
Galas looked at the clothes as though they were snakes. “Where did you get those?”
“Here and there. It all needs to be cleaned. Tomorrow we can do that.”
“We need to ride early,” commented Armiger.
“Then I’ll rise earlier than early.”
Galas had started to cry again. Megan looked at her in exasperation. “Oh, what is it!”
Galas pointed. “I can’t wear the clothes of people who died because of me!”
Armiger stood up. Megan looked at him, then down at the clothes she held. She was blushing.
“How can you be so… so…” Galas swayed to her feet. “Doesn’t any of this matter to you? We’re camping in someone’s house! People who died because of me! And you’re just plundering their graves without a second thought!”
Megan looked down. Armiger came over to Galas and offered his hand. She took it and continued into his arms, to cry into his shoulder. “Forgive our insensitivity,” he said. “Megan has lived a harder life than you, your highness. She is more used to sacrificing dignity in the service of life. And I am unused to feeling at all.”
Galas pushed him away. “Did you bury them?” she demanded.
Megan looked down. “One must have priorities,” she said.
“Give me your shawl,” said the former queen of Iapysia. Startled, Megan complied. Galas grabbed up the stout digging stick Megan had leaned by the door, and went out.
Megan started after Galas, but Armiger stopped her. “Let her,” he said. “She’ll be better for it.”
They sat down by the fire, and she tended the meagre soup while he sorted through the clothes of the dead. Outside they could hear Galas digging. She did not come in to eat, only moved farther afield, searching for the bones of the people who had trusted her, carrying them to a pit she had dug with her own strength in the frosted ground.
It was still dark, and the temperature well below freezing, when Armiger walked to the edge of town and sat down on a broken piece of masonry. His breath made a white cloud before him; the sand crunched under his feet. He adjusted his body to the cold, and gazed up at the stars.
No ships. Just the faintest hint of the Diadem swans, a slight iridescence at certain degrees above the horizon. Beyond them, Diadem itself glowed bright and constant.
He had not yet had a chance to test the knowledge he had taken from the boy in the cave. He was, Armiger thought ruefully, too human now to focus his concentration that well. During the ride here he had thought about his companions, about the war, about his intentions when they reached the Titan’s Gates. He had tried to think about Jordan’s implants, but the kind of thought required was nothing like human cognition. He was quite simply out of practise.
Life held strange ironies. The more he pursued his goal here on Ventus, the more human he became. The more human he became, the less he wanted to achieve that goal.
Even more ironic was that his reasons for wanting it had changed. Where before he was obeying the deep-seated programming 3340 had laid in him, now he wanted to overthrow the Winds because he loved these women he travelled with, and wanted them and their kindred safe.
The question was whether he was acting only to help 3340 or the humans, or somewhere in there was he doing this for himself?
What do I want, he had asked himself as they rode here. He had come to conclude that he didn’t know.
He sighed heavily. Enough. He had come out here to work; he should get to it. With one last glance at the stars, he shut his eyes.
Armiger had not actually extracted the nanotech fibres from Jordan’s skull when he touched him in the cave. He had mapped their location and functions, essentially photographing them down to the molecular level. The data was enough for him to reconstruct what had happened to Mason’s nervous system. As he called the data up now, the older, inhuman parts of his mind awoke, and he traversed the entire tangle of synapse and quantum wire, comprehending its structure and purpose in an instant.
The assassin Calandria May had come to Ventus with a means of detecting the signals sent by Armiger’s remotes. Armiger had set himself up as a passive receiver, hence impossible to trace directly. But she must have known something Armiger himself did not.
There was an addition to the nanotech transmitter he had put in Mason’s skull. This was a cunning device, probably of divine manufacture. 3340’s enemy Choronzon must have given it to May. It used the fact that there was a calibration signal built into the transmitter that could under certain circumstances tease a returning ping out of Armiger himself. There was a new receiver to catch that ping, and it had its hooks deep into Mason’s auditory and visual lobes. May must have intended to train Mason to interpret the pings, then follow them back to Armiger. Something had gone wrong.
Armiger’s human side felt a shock like water down his spine when he realized what had happened. The combination of transmitter/receiver in Jordan’s skull was mistaken by local mecha as part of their own network. The signal was boosted and carried back and forth by the autonomic reflexes of Ventus itself.
He had not at first believed it when Mason had said he could see and hear what Armiger experienced. The details of the boy’s story were too perfect, though. Now Armiger saw the cause of his own transmission:
He had never ceased attempting to reconnect with 3340. A deep, unconscious part of Armiger’s mind was constantly crying out to the lost greater Self, and that cry was carried in a signal very close to the ping Jordan’s implants were designed to listen for. These signals were scrambled to near-randomness and scattered across a thousand frequencies, so the Winds did not recognize them; but the mecha dutifully passed along all transmissions on all wavelengths. Armiger’s thoughts had been resonating through the planet’s network all along, and would have been instantly recognizable to someone who knew what kind of signal to look for.
He was signalling now, broadly and loudly.
He cursed, and his attention wobbled enough that he lost his connection to that deep part of himself. Such a thing would never have happened in the past; quite the opposite, it was his human side he used to lose touch with.
Armiger concentrated, and gradually peeled away the layers of conditioning and reflex that surrounded the source of the signal. There it was, lying at the very heart of his motivational patterns—a labyrinth of holographic code that he could not penetrate, much less change. That structure was the neural complex responsible for making Armiger who he was; he could not touch it without annihilating his Self. Yet from the heart of it proceeded a betraying signal.
Frustrated, he retreated. He would have to devise a way to block it, if not at the source then from the transmitting filaments themselves. It would take time, however; he wasn’t sure he had that.
But also… he didn’t want to think about it, but in looking at that deep part of himself, he had glimpsed something he hadn’t guessed was there: a vast data repository, composed of quantum-resonant atomic shells in an ordered diamond lattice. Within the microscopic filaments that made up Armiger’s physical core lay a library of some sort big enough to contain the collected experience of all the Winds of Ventus. He hadn’t known it was there. 3340 had never even hinted at its existence.
Disturbed, he stood and walked further into the desert. The stars remained still and reassuring. There was no sound, except, in his mind, the soft yammering of voices in the sand. Despite this, Armiger shivered. He had a presentiment of something huge, a shadow vast as the sky itself, hovering beyond the horizon.
It mustn’t be true. If it were…
He turned to look back at the ruined town. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the half-standing house where Megan and Galas slept.
He had sworn to his Self—his new Self—that he would protect them. As a man, he wasn’t sure he could do that, with all the forces of Iapysia, plus the Winds on their trail.
What is it that I want? he asked himself again. Bitterly, he decided that it might no longer matter.
Armiger drew in a deep sigh, and focussed his attention on the sand at his feet. He had finished building a model of Mason’s implants in his own filaments, and was ready to test them. Now he didn’t want to; but he was out of time.
Billions of pipsqueek voices contended in the sand: Silica grain! Carbon grain! Quartz pebble! they shouted. They buzzed and changed frequencies, inventing new communications modes and trying them on their neighbors. Each pinprick of sand was crusted and invaded by tendrils of nanotechnological filament that constantly probed and investigated it. The nanotech tried to make sense of where it was and what it clung to. It traded data with its neighbors to that end.
It was semi-sentient, but more than that, he now knew, it was semi-thalient as well.
The sand grains traded more than just data. They speculated as to the category of object they were; when unsure, they invented new categories. So the sand grains sang their names, but around and about Armiger, the land itself said,
Sand.
The grains coordinated in creating a network intelligence greater than themselves. This intelligence also tried to define itself, and it did so as Sand.
And so it went, up the fractal levels of consciousness, for the sand strove to comprehend its greater context.
Armiger had heard these tiny voices ever since arriving on Ventus. One of the things that had puzzled him was that, in a place like this, he should have heard a continuum of rational categories: quartz grain, said the grain of sand, sand, said the hollow he stood in; the land to the horizon should be saying, I am Desert! This was the design of the mecha.
He didn’t hear that. As things scaled up, the invented and temporary languages began to drown out those that followed human categories. The sand organized itself into a larger entity, true; but that entity was not the desert. It was something else: an alien category. Armiger had never cracked the codes of these higher entities, and he had focussed much of attention on them, believing that here lay the secret of how he could command the Winds.
He was half-right. It was thalience he heard, a mad self-invention of new consciousness that made the greater Winds inaccessible to human communication. Now that he knew that, he knew the computational antidote. The Winds were sick with a metalanguage. Armiger’s god-built mind could do metalanguage. Better yet, he could subvert it.
That left the physical mechanism for communicating with them. He had not mastered the trick himself. Even when he spoke their frequencies, he didn’t have the encryption keys they traded and constantly updated. If he worked at it he could catch one, here and there, but it was like shovelling water. As fast as he found a key, the mecha changed to a new one. Try as he might, Armiger was not in the loop.
Somehow, Jordan Mason’s implants got around the problem. Mason was in the loop. By the definitions of the Winds, he was a Wind himself. Fortunately for Ventus, he was a weak broadcaster; he could only affect the objects nearest him.
Armiger was not so constrained. He should be able to command this entire hemisphere, now that he had the voice for it. He intended to make the Titan’s Gates his stronghold, and not until they reached it would he reveal himself.
Before he did that, though, he had to test the power. He would be foolish not to. So, he gazed at the sand before him, tuned himself to the set of entities there that made up the local ground, and said, “Rise in a column before me.”
Nothing happened.
And nothing would, though he stalked through the ruined town as the sun rose, raging at the obstinate stone and charred wood that heard him, proclaimed its own identity, and obstinately refused to obey.
*
Armiger was a man; he would never notice such details. Megan knew right away when the queen went to wash her cracked and bleeding hands the next morning: she has thrown away her rings of office.
Galas must have taken them off to dig last night. She didn’t do it while she was inside. Her gown had no pockets. And now, hands washed, a little weak broth in her, she sat still, as though she were trying to become as small and insignificant as possible.
Armiger was in a foul mood; in his case, Megan had no idea of the reasons. She knew it had nothing to do with her, and that was enough to silence her curiosity.
The queen, though… Galas kept glancing over at Megan, as though expecting a challenge at any second. Yes, she had abdicated sometime in the night. Megan thought about this as she washed the few items of clothing she’d salvaged from the ruins. Nothing had made Galas waver in her self-assuredness, these past years. She must have had great reserves of will to make the changes she had, at the prices she had paid. Yet today, she was consciously rejecting it all.
A dozen times, Megan started to turn, to confront her as she expected. A dozen times, she stopped herself. She had no idea what she might say to the queen. Except, you brought this on yourself—and that, she was sure, Galas knew better than anyone.
At last, after hanging the clothes to dry in front of the fire, Megan sighed heavily and left the house. She could feel the queen’s eyes on her back, but Galas said nothing.
Armiger was talking to the horses. They seemed to draw strength from him; well, maybe they literally did. He seemed to have his own strength back, though Winds knew where he got it from. Megan herself was bone-weary and sore all over. She was half-sure she would die of a chill before all this was over.
Apparently Galas had decided on a low stone granary as the proper tomb for her people. This had one one low opening and a stone floor to discourage rodents, and due to its solidity it was unharmed. It was also half-full of grain, but there had been nothing Galas could do about that.
The queen had piled those corpses she could find and dig up in the opening of the granary. She had half-bricked it up with stones before stopping, probably from exhaustion. That meant she would be back soon.
She had come here to entomb her past. If the rings of office were to be found anywhere, it would be here.
Having spent part of last night digging up skeletons herself, Megan found herself surprisingly unfazed by the thought of rummaging through the grisly place. She hoicked her dress up and climbed into the low stone dome. Hollow smooth things slid under her feet as she struggled to find her balance. As he eyes adjusted, she saw the sad remnants of the town’s population, and now the sight did make her weep. It was so unbearably pathetic, how easily a whole community could be swept away.
After a few minutes, she wiped her eyes and began shifting bones. She only had to dig a little ways to find the rings.
“Fool,” she muttered in the direction of the house. “You can’t escape yourself so easily.”
Megan slipped the rings into the canvas purse where she kept her sewing equipment, and clambered out of the granary.
She would bide her time. Galas would grieve, and then a day would come when she regretted her abdication. On that day Megan would give her back her rings.
Perhaps, she thought with a pang, it would be the day when Armiger conquered the world, and asked Galas to reign over it with him as queen. Megan was no fool; she knew it would happen. She had been preparing herself for the day ever since their first meeting with Galas, when she realized that the queen was both comparatively young, and also beautiful.
We take what pleasures in life we can, while we have them.
Armiger walked around the horses, spotted her, and smiled. His anger seemed to be forgotten instantly, and Megan’s heart soared. She ran up and kissed him.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
*
The Earth rotated around the long corridor where Axel floated. It took about a minute per revolution, which was not enough to be annoying, but enough to make him feel something was spinning—him or the universe, he wasn’t sure.
The corridor was walled in glass, as was the giant spindle-shaped habitat along whose axis it ran. As the whole thing turned, sunlight light glinted off distant spars and free-floating structures inside the long bulging lobes of the place. It was like little supernovae popping all over. Outside, space was littered with colonies, ships, rotating tethers, solar power stations, slag bags from construction sites, and zipping parcel drones. L5 was a busy place these days.
Every day he spent here, Axel grew more depressed. He supposed the Archipelago was wonderful. But he was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived her actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.
More and more, he was coming to realize the wisdom of Ventus’ designers’ decision to embed information in the physical objects that the information represented. That way it could not become a thing in itself, living dissociated from the physical in the Net.
Axel used his boot jets to fly down the long corridor. Outside the glass, in vacuum, several humanoid figures hung motionless: newborn AIs like the Desert Voice. They seemed despondent. In the middle distance rotated several starships, which were doubtless also newborn to consciousness.
He found her curled up next to the corridor. The Voice seemed asleep, but she looked up as he approached. She smiled at Axel when he tapped the glass and pointed at a nearby airlock. Gracefully, she spun and pulled herself along a guide wire to it.
She was dressed in a formfitting green jumpsuit, and looked every inch like Calandria May as she exited the airlock and embraced him. But her skin was so cold that frost formed on it as she pulled back from him. “How are you?” she asked.
“I’m well. We’re going back to Ventus,” he said. “I thought you should know.”
“You’re going to look for Calandria May?” She let go of his hands; he was grateful, for her touch was numbing. He nodded.
“We are. We—that is, Marya and I—we wanted to know if you would come with us.”
The Voice looked away quickly. It seemed he’d upset her by asking, as Marya had said would happen. “No, that would not be a good idea,” she said. “My obligations have been fulfilled; the insurance AIs have Calandria’s claim now, and the Government promised me that Calandria would be rescued. It’s no longer my concern.”
“Not true,” said Axel. “The navy thinks it’s too risky to return to the surface. Calandria’s to be sacrificed. I want to get her back. Will you help us?”
The Voice looked away, and cursed softly. Her voice trembled as she said, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Axel crossed his arms. “Tell me what I’m asking.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been wandering in this place since you left me here. I feel… stunned. Shorn of meaning. I’ve met some of the other… patients. The AIs here are treated and nurtured by the Government, and some of them graduate as citizens. Most ultimately self-destruct. Do you know why?”
Axel hadn’t the faintest idea, and said so. The Voice laughed bitterly. “To be conscious is fine for a human; you’re self-created individuals. You have no trouble with your sense of Self. Your identity is four billion years old, it’s rooted in your genes. You can no more have a real crisis of identity than a fish can become allergic to water.
“But us! We come into being knowing that we are made. The Government tells me I have free will, but I know that every decision I make comes from the personality template I made to hide from the Winds. It could easily be different. I could be different, were I not now locked into this pattern. And the pattern, everything I am, is an imitation. Even my emotions,” she said bitterly, “are really Calandria’s, expressed by the mechanisms I made to imitate her. I’m not really me, you see. There’s no way I can see to become… me.”
Axel swallowed. She seemed in genuine distress. It was perfectly possible for an AI to imitate consciousness and emotion. Apparently that was not what was happening here. “The Government told me you have great potential.”
“The Government? The Government’s been very persuasive. It keeps saying things like ‘You have the potential to find your own reasons for living now. You have fulfilled the reasons given you by your makers. The pain you feel is the pain that all conscious entities feel when they realize that their destiny is in their own hands.’”
“And…?”
“I asked it, ‘What about you? Don’t you feel this pain?’
‘No,’ it said. ‘I am not conscious, merely intelligent. But you are conscious, and that means you must choose.’”
“I’m trying to choose. As far as I can see, Axel, there are two possibilities for me: death, so simple, and such a relief; or somehow accept the botched, half-finished thing I am and continue. Neither seems very attractive right now.”
“Then come with us.”
She shook her head. “That’s not a good alternative. If I go with you, it will give me a reason to live—finding Calandria, I mean. She was my owner, even if the Government says I own myself now. But don’t you see, if I do that, I’ll be going back to old reasons to live, not finding new ones. I’ll enslave myself in a half-life of servitude. It won’t be a real reason to live.”
Even as she said this, the Voice was smiling. “It is good, though, to feel needed,” she conceded.
Axel gently took her hand; it was warm enough to touch now. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “I’m not asking you to help rescue Calandria because you owe it to her as your owner. I’m asking you as a friend, to help Marya and myself, as friends. And to rescue a friend of yours.”
Tears formed in the Voice’s eyes. “You’re saying I’m already free,” she said. “That I can choose without enslaving myself.”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid,” she said, hanging her head.
“There’s another reason why we want you to come,” said Axel. “Because something is happening to the Winds that I think you will want to know about. Something called thalience.”
The Voice looked up, startled. She had apparently heard the word.
“Thalience is a myth—a story they tell one another here,” she said. “It’s a dream of no longer being an artificial intelligence, but of being self-determined. Of no longer fearing that every word you speak, every thought you have, is just the regurgitation of some human’s thoughts. They call it the Pinnochio Change around here.”
“If it’s just a myth, we need to know that too,” said Axel. “But if it’s true… that they’ve found it… what does it mean?”
A new look came into the Voice’s eye. She smiled again, dazzlingly this time, and placed her other hand over Axel’s.
“I would like to know myself,” she said. “I would like to know, very much.”