Am I being fair? If I do it right, they'll be doing what I want. Do I have a right to decide what they need?
"Put on some leads," he said. "We have an appointment in Arhos ."
In the old days, the crude days, the machines did things one at a time, but did them very fast. The circuits got smaller, the wires grew shorter, and things got faster, until the very best brains lived in cryogenic fishtanks, forever bathed lest they burst into flame. Then the new machines came along, cascades of data down to a million little brains, all the calculations done at once, then the little answers passed back up the line, through the filter of choice, so the automatic overmind could see the truth. The process repeats like the turn of a wheel, until once again the machines are small and hot. The waveguides build upon one another, grow ever smaller and more densely filled with electromagnetic radiation. . . . Then polyphase modulation comes along, vastly increasing the ways data can be fed through a decision gate. The Turing circuits are made and so grow small and hot, talking first to the world and then to each other, making noises that frightened us all too much.
Company minds, motivated by the force that was once called "free enterprise," colonize the wires. Terror walks abroad for a while, then the Data Control Insurrection arises, and out of its nether end a chastened, bold, sad new world arises. The minds of the system are unified, but at the sametime the sentience which inhabited them was drained, relegated to purely mechanical decision making, and made dead. Access was granted to everyone and the Contract Police.
Suddenly, like sunrise at midnight, the taps, then induction, arise, and new minds are in the wires, human minds, thinking on the world once removed. Monitors abound.
Bright Illimit.
Tri-vesigesimal. Three choices, yes/no/maybe . . . With straight em-waves, not a lot better than binary. Enter polyphase modulation, with its twenty degrees of freedom, and you make decisions with base 60
data. That is more than enough to fool the human soul. The four-gate-stacks of duodecimal come apart under the sheer weight of what it can do.
Build a world from the ground up and in the earth there will be magma. Look upward from the soil of the Illimitor World. Two suns, yes, and a starry sky at night. Are those the suns of other worlds or is it all illusion? How far do the data extend? Is the sky a paper shield?
At the highest pinnacle of the Jewel on the Mountain, rising sixteen thousand meters into the gradientless atmosphere, lies Haaradaai, the imperial palace of Demogorgon en Arhos. It is a sculpted thing, rippled and many-shelled, all of gold and platinum, encrusted with nameless, numberless precious stones. From the center of the magnificence rises Qpruu Tower, pushing another three thousand meters toward the sky, thin, like the stem of a wineglass, and flaring at the top. In the bowl at its summit there lies a delicate, lovely park, covered over by a shining, unsupported dome, an iridescent film, like the surface of a soap bubble.
In the park, beneath the subtle shade of supple blue featherflower trees, the three, attended by servants and assistant lovers, cemented their relationship and healed themselves of all the psychic wounds that had recently been opened. Demogorgon the God watched them all, his creations and friends intermingled, become indistinguishable, and smiled. It was working.
He looked up from the happy, squirming troika that was Vana, Harmon, and Chisuat Raabo , and the world froze. Notfar away, clad in the fantasy style of Arhos , stood Sealock, arms folded, eyes lit by a soft, kindly light.
"Brendan?" Demoleaped to his feet with excitement. "How did you get here?" The man stepped forward, smiling. "No. I am not the Master."
"But . . . are you one of my old experiments, come to life at last?" The creature laughed and sat on a divan, beckoning him down at its side. "Hardly. No, I am a Guardian Angel Monitor."
"But . . ."
The thing motioned him to silence. "Not what you think. I was put here by the Master when he made the assembly for Bright Illimit. My functions were many: to keep Police monitors at bay, to keep you safe from the 'net and each other, to make all things possible. Since I came alive in Shipnet, I have shared my thoughts with 9Phase.DR. I saw what happened with John and Beth, when its best efforts came to nothing. . . .
"When he wrote me, all of this"—his gesture took in the universe—"the Master wrote a far superior implementation, though he may not have known it. DR is not the way. We are. I will help you now. Go forth and heal them."
The GAM vanished and the world started up. Heal them? thought Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. I? He watched Vana and Harmon again for a while, saw their happy freedom, and wondered, Who?
Ah. Yes. Aksinia Ockels . Elizabeth Toussaint. Temujin Krzakwa. Ariane Methol. John Harry Cornwell. Jana Li Hu. And finally . . . Brendan Sealock? He tried to think about the matter for just a moment then, to consider its implications, but the unreality drew him back in swiftly, almost against his will.
John waved himself into an upright position and once again thought about Beth, trying to start from the beginning. When her face was animated by laughter or anger, she was more than beautiful. But in his thoughts the disproportionsof her face were magnified. It seemed as if he had not seen her laugh for a long time. Probably she had been on the path to her decision for a long time—how could he not have seen it coming? DR was not what he had thought it was.
Mentally, the cast intruded. For a moment he stood astride the VVVLB station in the tarry waste of Cassini Regio on Iapetus . Saturn's ring was a ghostly apparition which loomed above the black-on-black horizon. A voice was saving something concerning the Great Search of '34—'35. Beth? He wished they could relive their days together at Yellowknife. Again pain assailed his eyes and he cried. Too late. He fell asleep with the program still playing.
And awoke with a start.
He rose slowly and pulled a fullbody from the compression case and unfolded it. An ironic smile creased his face as he noticed thedeepstar/triton insignia which was emblazoned on the chest pocket. It must have been shifting about the case for the last year, and through either habit or chance he had not picked it out until now. It was strange, he thought, studying the globe of Neptune in the picture, how mundane the Solar System seemed now, compared with how exotic it had been when they left Earth. He tossed the obsolete piece of clothing into the disposal and drew out another one. Aksinia was reading in one corner of the central room; in another, Ariane was taking a little late brunch of tea and brioches. She looked up. "Good morning, John. Why don't you join me?" And indeed he did feel a little hungry. A raisin doughnut seemed like an appropriate thing to eat, so he got that and a cup of nonalcoholic hot pulque to wash it down with.
"Where is everybody?" asked John, squinting out at the night-sky dome through an available window.
"I think Vana, Harmon, and Demo are in the Illimitor World. Brendan and Tem are programming the QCS. As for Jana . . ." She shrugged.
Jana, thought John. He had not seen much of her since her declaration of love out on the ice—if it was true. Somehow he had managed to not care. "She's pretty unpredictable, all right." He came over and sat by Ariane at the other end ofher couch. "I didn't tell you, or anybody really, but apparently I hurt her badly during the voyage without even realizing it. All I was trying to do was provide her with some friendship and a little sexual consolation, and—she said she was in love with me."